Dream Gates

I like Julia Cameron’s suggestion in The Artist’s Way that if you want to become a writer, you start by doing your “morning pages”, three pages you’ll write without worrying about content or consequences. However, I must note that Julia wasn’t the first to come up with this idea. One of her precursors was Ludwig Börne (1786-1837), a German political writer and satirist who interested Freud, who told his  friend and biographer Ernest Jones that Börne was the first author he ever “got caught up in”.

Börne’s essay  ”The Art of Becoming an Original Writer in Three Days”,  encouraged Freud to trust free association in his counseling sessions. It offers useful guidance for writers, accomplished or wannabe:

Take a few sheets of paper and for three days in succession write down, without any falsification or hypocrisy, everything that comes into your head. Write down what you think of yourself, or the Turkish war, of Goethe, of a criminal case, of the Last Judgment, of your boss – and when the three days are over you will be amazed at what novel and startling thoughts have spilled out of you. This is the art of becoming an original writer in three days.

This may get you under way. I must add that, for regular writing practice, there is something even better than the morning pages or the three-day ramble, and this is timed writing.  Give yourself just 15 minutes, 30 minutes tops, and see what you can deliver in that period. You may be amazed by how much you – and your creative daimon – can bring through.

Chief of the West by Standing Bear in SUNY Press/Excelsior edition of "Black Elk Speaks"

Dreams require action. As I observed in Conscious Dreaming, in indigenous dreaming traditions, dreamwork is always oriented toward action. The principal task of the shaman, as a dream specialist, is to confirm the meaning of the dream and clarify the steps the dreamer should now take to honor the dream.

Take the case of a childhood vision that Black Elk, the Lakota holy man, had left unhonored. He was initially afraid to tell anyone about what he had seen. At last he confided in a wichasa wakon, a holy man, who told him: “You must do what the bay horse in your vision told you to do. You must perform this vision for your people. You must make the horse dance for the people to see. If you do not do this something very bad will happen to you.”

They proceeded to enact Black Elk’s vision. This became a major community undertaking. Scenes from the vision were painted on tepees. Black Elk was required to fast and cleanse himself in the sweat lodge. He taught chosen singers the songs from the vision so that they could perform them during the enactment. Others in the tribe were cast as characters from the dream, human, spirit or animal, and painted and costumed accordingly.

In Black Elk Speaks, John G. Neihardt observed that “even the horses seemed to be healthier and happier after the dance.”

Black Elk’s big dream wasn’t reduced by analysis or assimilated into the familiar structures of everyday life. As Mary Watkins noted in her wonderful book Waking Dreams,  ”the attempt was made to bring the daily life into relation with the vision”.

Related post: Black Elk, the poet and the dream passport

Michele Ferro, "Oblivious of Shadows"

Dreams are not on our case; they are on our side. This is one of my personal mantras about dreams and (yes) it applies even to nightmares.

In my personal lexicon, a nightmare is not only a “bad” or scary dream; it is an interrupted or aborted dream. We are so frightened we run away. We wake ourselves up and try to slam the door on the dream experience, hoping that it is “only” a dream and can’t get out and come after us. This is a very foolish strategy. The challenges we face in dreams are challenges that are being presented by life itself. If we learn to confront the underlying issues inside the dream space, we may be able to prevent those issues from blowing up in our regular lives. This may require us to take action in waking life, based on what we have learned in our dreams; but we will lack the essential data required for appropriate action if we have left the dream broken and abandoned, behind that door we are trying to keep shut.

Common forms of the nightmare include:

The nameless terror.

The intruder.

Being pursued.

Being attacked by a wild animal.

Suffering an infestation of bugs, spiders or bats.

An unwanted encounter with the dead.

Being attacked by vampires, demons or zombies.

Being overwhelmed by a giant wave or a twister.

Being in a plane crash or an auto accident.

You probably have your own version. We have different lives, different characters, and different styles of dreaming (another reason why you will never find the full meaning of dreams by looking them up in a dream dictionary). My own least favorite dreams are ones in which I am stuck in a place where I don’t want to be.

Whatever the content of the dreams you flee from, the Rx is the same: try to learn to confront the challenge on the ground where it is presented. This requires firm intention and some degree of courage. You want to learn to go back inside a dream you fled and try to clarify and resolve what is going on there. You can accomplish this through the dream reentry technique explained in several of my books, including Conscious Dreaming and The Three “Only” Things. You want to give a name to that nameless dread. You want to know whether the plane crash was literal or symbolic and, either way, what you need to do to avoid it. You want to establish whether that dream intruder is someone who could literally break into your house, or a disease that could invade your body, or an aspect or yourself – maybe even your Greater Self – that is trying to get your attention. If you are scared of dream vampires, you want to think about who or what in your life may be draining your energy; if your dream house is infested, you need to know whether this reflects a condition in your body that may need medical attention.

I think it’s like this: our dream producers are constantly trying to alert us to things essential to our health, wholeness and well-being. When we ignore these messages, they resort to special effects to get our attention. If we persist in ignoring the messages, the problem the nightmares reflect is likely to show up in our regular lives. Nightmares are a gift in the way that a smoke detector going off in the middle of the night – when there is a real fire hazard – is a gift.

Sometimes we find that what we are fleeing in dreams is an aspect or our own power. When I first started living in rural New York, I dreamed repeatedly of a giant bear that came into my bedroom. He did not menace me, but he was so much bigger than me that he scared me. Finally, I told myself (as I would now counsel anyone) that I needed to go back inside those dreams, confront the bear, and discover why he was in my space. When I did that, the bear caught me up in his great embrace and showed me that we were joined at the heart, reassuring me that when I needed healing for myself or others, he would be there. I later learned that the bear is the great medicine animal of North America, and he has kept his promise.

Jain image of a Siddha (liberated person) in Sagar Darshan collection, U. Minnesota

“The soul is only partly confined to the body, just as God is only partly enclosed in the body of the world.”

The author is the Polish physician, alchemist and philosopher Michael Sendivogius (1566-1636), in his tract De Sulphure. The statement ignited the mind of Carl Jung, who explores the thinking behind it at length in Psychology and Alchemy, volume XII in the Collected Works.

In this conception the human soul is “the vice-regent of God”; it rules the mind and this rules the body. It operates within the body, but the greater part of its functions is exercised beyond the body. Imagination is the great faculty of soul. It is through its “imaginative faculty” that soul can operate in areas of “utmost profundity” (profundissima) outside the body. It has “absolute and independent power” to do many things that the body cannot perceive.

“When it so desires, it has the greatest power over the body, for otherwise our philosophy would be in vain.”

There is a constant engagement between soul and the world, and this can generate events far beyond the reach of the body or the ordinary mind. The discussion hints at the overlapping and interacting soul energies of individuals and whole groups of people, whether for good or bad.