Here's how to bring the energy and magic of dreams into daily life, in four easy steps:
Make a date with your dreams
Before going 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 soul mate” or simply “I want to have fun in my dreams and remember.” Have pen and paper bedside so you can record something whenever you wake up. Chronicle your dream in a journal later, giving it a title. See if you can come up with a personal motto or “bumper sticker” distilling the message or quality of the dream.
Get a dream partner and share
Regular dream sharing is wonderful fun, builds heart-centered relationships, brings you fresh perspectives on your issues and helps to 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. When you share your dream, tell it as simply and clearly as possible, and refer to the dream by its title. Your partner should then ask a few simple questions, such as, “How did you feel upon waking up?” (The first feelings are usually an excellent guide to the general character and urgency of the dream.) “Did you recognize any of the elements of the dream in waking life?” “Could any parts of the dream be played out in the future?” Then change roles, and listen and ask questions while your partner shares.
Do not attempt to tell each other what the dreams mean. That would risk stealing the dreamer's power or losing the energy of the dream in verbal analysis. You can, however, simply offer helpful, non-intrusive feedback by saying what aspects of the dream you might consider important, if it had been your dream. Finally, the dreamer should be asked, “What are you going to do to honor this dream?”
Act on your dreams
Dreams require action! If you do nothing with your dreams in waking life, you miss out on the magic. Real magic consists of bringing something you dreamt from a deeper reality into your waking life. This is why active dreaming is a way to access 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 two key ways of honoring our dreams and the powers that speak through them.
Here are some more suggestions:
• Create from a dream. Turn the dream into a story or poem. Draw from it; paint from it; turn it into a comic strip.
• Take a physical action to celebrate an element in the dream, such as wearing the color that was prominent in the dream, traveling to a place from the dream, or 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 object to “hold” the energy of a dream so that you can easily return to it.
• Use the dream as a sort of travel advisory. If the dream appears to contain guidance pertaining to a future situation, use it 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 in subsequent dreaming to clarify details, dialogue with a dream character and explore the larger reality – and have marvelous fun!
Go back inside your dreams
Perhaps you have a recurring dream that includes a menacing animal, person or situation that makes you feel uneasy or creates fear. Consider going back into the dream and facing your adversary in order to find out why it keeps appearing in your dreams. In other words, “brave up” to whatever you need to confront.
Your dreams may offer you gifts of power and healing that you can only claim by going back into the dream space 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.
One of my students, Joanie, was disturbed by a recurring dream of a dog that was caged and abused, cowering in a confined space spattered with feces. She resolved to re-enter the dream and, when she did, she was able to free the dog and cleanse and groom it. When she did this, besides the relief and satisfaction she felt, she also felt herself reclaiming a part of her own energy that had been lost through confinement and abuse at an earlier stage of her life.
Another of my students, Wanda, woke terrified from a dream in which 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 re-entry is a core technique that you may find very beneficial. If you would like to experiment, start by picking a dream – old or recent, it doesn't matter which – that has some real energy for you, one that gets your juices flowing. Get 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, taste it. Ask yourself what you need to know and what you intend to do inside the dream. And let yourself start flowing back into the dream space.
If you are doing dream re-entry at home, you may wish to experiment with recorded drumming or soft music. A steady beat, typically in the range of four to seven beats per second, can help shift consciousness and facilitate travel into the dream space. The steady beat or soft music can help override mental clutter and focus energy and intention on the journey.
As you become an active dreamer, you can develop the ability to journey through your mind to other times and places, and alternative realities. As a result of the journey, you can access helpful information to create healing of mind, body and spirit. Your dreams will open the ways.
© Copyright Robert Moss
Robert Moss is a world-renowned dream teacher, a shamanic counselor, a novelist and a former professor of ancient history. His deep engagement with the dream world springs from his early childhood in Australia, where he survived a series of near-death experiences, and has deepened through his visionary encounters with his Celtic ancestors and an ancient Native American woman of power. He teaches Active Dreaming – his pioneer synthesis of dream work and shamanism – all over the world and is the founder of a contemporary mystery school. His many books include Conscious Dreaming, Dreamgates, Dreamways of the Iroquois and The Dreamer's Book of the Dead (Inner Traditions, October, 2005). He offers a high-energy course in the core techniques of Active Dreaming in his new video series, The Way of the Dreamer (available on DVD). Robert also has a new drumming CD called Wings for the Journey. You can visit his website at www.mossdreams.com.
MBSC is hosting a program called "Dream for a Change" on Tuesday, August 16, 2005 at the Cleveland Airport Marriott on W. 150th Street. Learn how you can use your dreams to make small but powerful changes in your life. Cost (including dinner) is $30 for members, full-time students and first-time non-practitioners; $40 for others. Networking and registration begin at 5:45 p.m.; dinner 6:15; program 7:00. Speakers are Jackie Lowe-Stevenson and Jody Wainer. For information, visit www.MBSConline.org or call (216) 321-9181.
