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If you are not in touch with our dreams, you are missing out on a tremendous resource for self-healing. Here’s why: The body talks to you in dreams. It shows you what it needs to stay well and previews possible symptoms long before they manifest. If you recognize these messages from the body and act on them, you may be able to avoid painful and costly medical intervention further down the trail. Dreams are also experiences of the soul. They show you the spiritual sources of wellness and illness. The Iroquois say that dreams reveal the "secret wishes of the soul" — as opposed to the narrow agendas of the ego. If you honor the soul’s purpose, as revealed in dreams, you move towards health and balance. In traditional Iroquois practice, it is the duty of the community to listen to dreams in order to help the dreamer to identify and honor the wishes of the soul. Your dreams provide you with fresh imagery and energy for self-healing. By going back inside your dreams and consciously reshaping your inner dramas, you may be able to help shift the body in the direction of health. Dreams invite you to reclaim vital soul energy lost through pain or grief or addiction. Absence of dream recall is sometimes a symptom of soul loss. Dreams in which you encounter a younger version of yourself or return again and again to earlier scenes from your life may be invitations to bring home parts of your energy and identity that went missing. You can bring through dream guidance for others as well as yourself. Dreams give you a direct line to sacred sources of guidance and healing. In sacred sleep, the ancients not only sought diagnosis and healing images; they sought a direct encounter with the Divine Healer. You can ask for dream healing in the same way. Here’s how to bring the energy and magic of dreams into everyday life, in four easy steps: Before you go to sleep, write down an intention for your dreams. Make this a juicy intention — e.g. "I would like to be healed" or "I want to meet my soulmate" or simply "I want to have fun in my dreams and remember." Have pen and paper ready so you can record something whenever you wake up. Write your dream in a journal later; give it a title, and see if you can come up with a personal motto or "bumper sticker" distilling the message or quality of the dream. Regular dream sharing is wonderful fun, builds heart-centered relationships, brings fresh perspectives on issues and helps nudge you towards taking appropriate action to honor your dreams. You’ll want to begin by creating a safe space where you and your partner will give each other undivided attention. Whoever is sharing a dream should tell it as simply and clearly as possible, giving the dream a title. The partner then asks a few simple questions. Start by asking how the dreamer felt when she first woke up — the first feelings are usually an excellent guide to the general character and urgency of the dream. Ask the dreamer whether she recognizes any of the elements in the dream in waking life, and whether any parts of the dream might possibly be played out in the future. You are not going to tell each other what your dreams mean. You don’t want to steal the dreamer’s power or to lose the energy of the dream in verbal analysis. You can offer helpful, non-intrusive feedback by saying, "If it were my dream, I would think about such-and-such." Finally, you’ll want to ask the dreamer, "What are you going to do to honor this dream?" Dreams require action! If you do not do something with your dreams in waking life, you miss out on the magic. Real magic consists of bringing something through from a deeper reality into your physical life, which is why active dreaming is a way of natural magic — but only if you take the necessary action to bring the magic through. Keeping a dream journal and sharing dreams on a regular basis are important ways of honoring dreams and the powers that speak through dreams. Here are some more suggestions: • Create from a dream. Turn the dream into a story or poem. Draw from it, paint from it, or turn it into a comic strip. • Take a physical action. Celebrate an element in the dream, such as wearing a color that was featured in the dream, traveling to a place from the dream, making a phone call to an old friend who showed up in the dream • Use an object or create a dream talisman to hold the energy of the dream. A stone or crystal may be a good place to hold the energy of a dream so you can return to it. • Use the dream as a travel advisory. If the dream appears to contain guidance on a future situation, carry it with you as a personal travel advisory. Summarize the dream information on a cue card or hold it in an image you can physically carry. • Go back into the dream. Clarify details, dialogue with a dream character, explore the larger reality, and have marvelous fun! When I started living in rural New York, I dreamed repeatedly of a huge standing bear. Though the bear never menaced me, it made me uneasy because it was several times my size. I realized that I needed to face the bear and find out why it kept appearing in my dreams. I made it my intention to go back inside my dream and "brave up" to whatever I needed to confront. I stepped back into the dreamspace — as you might step back into a room you had left — and the bear was there, vividly real and tremendous. There was nothing cute or "made-up" about this encounter. I had to push myself to approach the bear. When I found the courage to step up to the bear, he embraced me and we became the same size. He showed me we were joined at the heart by something like a thick umbilical, pumping life energy. He told me he would show me what people need in order to be healed. I later discovered that the bear is a great medicine animal in Native American tradition, and that the most powerful healers of the Lakota are the members of the Bear Dreamers Society, composed of those who have been called by the Bear in dreams and visions. Today, when I lead a healing circle in North America, we call in the spirit bear. Your dreams may offer gifts of power and healing that you can only claim by going back into the dreamspace and moving beyond fear or irresolution. You may need to go back inside a dream to overcome nightmare terrors, to clarify whether the dream is about a literal or symbolic car crash, to talk to someone who appeared in a dream, to reclaim your own lost children, to use a personal image as a portal to multidimensional reality, or simply to have more fun! Joanie was disturbed by a recurring dream of a dog that was caged and abused, cowering in a confined space that was spattered with feces. She resolved to reenter the dream and had the satisfaction of freeing the dog and cleansing and grooming it. When she did this, she felt herself reclaiming a part of her own energy that had been lost through confinement and abuse at an earlier stage of her life. Wanda woke terrified from a dream in which she felt she had been killed in a car accident. She needed the missing details. She went back inside her dream, and found herself involved in a head-on collision with a little red Honda on an icy bridge. Two weeks later, when there was ice on the road, she remembered the dream as she approached that same bridge, stopped her car, and avoided a collision with a little red Honda that skidded across the road just ahead of her. Dream reentry is one of the core techniques that I teach and practice. If you would like to experiment, start by picking a dream that has some real energy for you. It doesn’t matter whether it is a dream from last night or from twenty years ago, as long as it has juice. Get yourself settled in a comfortable, relaxed position in a quiet space and minimize external light. Focus on a specific scene from your dream. Let it become vivid on your mental screen. See if you can let all your senses become engaged, so you can touch it, smell it, hear it, and taste it. Ask yourself what you need to know, and what you intend to do inside the dream. Then let yourself start flowing back into the dreamspace. In my Active Dreaming workshops, we use shamanic drumming — a steady beat on a simple frame drum, typically in the range of four to seven beats per second — to help shift consciousness and facilitate travel into the dreamspace. The steady beat helps to override mental clutter and focus energy and intention on the journey. If you are doing dream reentry at home, you may wish to experiment with a drumming tape or soft music. The applications of the dream reentry process for healing are inexhaustible. In this way, for example, we may be able to travel inside the body and help to shift its behaviors in the direction of health. In her wonderful novel for kids of all ages, A Wind in the Door, Madeleine L’Engle describes a journey into a world inside one of the mitochondria of a sick boy; when things are brought into balance inside a particle of a cell, the whole body is healed. As we become active dreamers, we can develop the ability to journey in precisely this way. Our dreams will open the ways. Robert Moss is a renowned shamanic dream teacher and the author of Conscious Dreaming and Dreaming True. He is leading an evening program on Active Dreaming at EastWest Bookshop on November 8 and a depth weekend workshop in Seattle on November 9-10. For reservations, contact Bob Coalson: (253) 582-1467 or <Coalson-Lakewood@worldnet.att.net>. Visit Robert’s Web site at <www.mossdreams.com>. |
In your dreams,
you have access to a personal doctor who makes house calls, provides
an impeccable diagnosis of your physical, emotional, and spiritual
condition, and doesn’t charge a cent.