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| "River of Dreams" Elizabeth Westaway, 1962 |
How were dreams approached in your family? What did you
learn from others about dreaming growing up? What dreams do you remember from your childhood? What help did you receive figuring
dreams out?
For many, the answer to any of these questions is, not
much. It complicates things that
the most memorable dreams are often experienced as nightmares. Unless we’re working with PTSD playback
dreams, nightmares are usually dream gauntlets thrown down by our dream guides
because they think we’re ready to face what we’re running from in waking
life. As you know from many of my
previous posts, I believe a nightmare is
my best friend. Working and
playing with nightmares is a
practice that has always payed off for me and for dreamers in my groups who’ve
bravely ventured where before they feared to tread. There is an old saying: “Where there’s fear, there’s power”
that is especially true in dreaming dimensions.
One of the perks of being a dream teacher is you witness
magic and healing in every encounter involving someone’s dream. Sometimes people tell me they used to
have vivid, magical, wonderful dreams as a child, then “something” happened and
their dream portals dried up and their dreams are full of the worries of waking
existence, when they’re remembered at all.
I’ve had the great honor of seeing that turn around in my
students. Just recently someone
who said that very thing to me when we first met at a workshop, at the end of
the group course she took with me said of a dream she'd just had:
“Last night it hit me like a ton of
bricks! I guess I couldn't see the forest for the trees but this was the
first time in decades that I was flying again in my dreams. For me this
is HUGE as I loved my childhood flying adventures and finally I was, AM,
airborne again!!!!” Yay, hurray,
yippee…that’s all I have to say.”
Again and again, I see
the joy people take in their own dreams once they reconnect with their
dreaming self. Wouldn’t it be
better if we nurtured the dream life we all came here with in our children,
instead of letting it be shut down due to ignorance or censorship?
It’s only a dream? Really? If we learn to follow and trust our dreaming intelligence we
can pass that wisdom on to our children and they can pass the magic of that world
from their vantage point back to us. Parents who know how to work and
play with their own dreams are at a tremendous advantage, as are their
children.
For one, dreaming is an organic path to consciousness and
spirituality. We have natural access to the many dimension of reality we left
behind to incarnate into this physical body, in this physical world, through
our dreaming, lifelong.
This can come in handy when addressing the quintessential
questions about God, death and the meaning of life that often get asked of
parents by their children.
When a parent has nurtured a dream dialogue with their child, and
encouraged a dream practice in their child, it’s more than likely that child, having grown up with strong dream guidance and experience, will come
up with some answers on her/his own. If not, the parent has the entire cornucopia of dream
images they've heard from their child to build an explanation to which the child can thoroughly relate.
For example, this might be a scenario of a parent listening to a child’s dream of a beloved grandma, who died; the child dreamed of her last night: “You saw grandma last night
in your dream? Yes, grandma died
last week. The dream didn’t scare
you? You felt happy to see
her? She wanted to visit you and
tell you she’s okay and how much she still loves you?” Then a parent
might say; “Shall we draw a
picture of your dream? We can give
it to grandpa, if you want.”
A parent with a dreaming practice has access to a unique
resource for nurturing a spiritual core in their children that goes far beyond what Western
culture has offered in centuries.
Today’s parents can learn how to develop a family dream practice that
will serve their children throughout
their lives.
I hear so many friends say when their children reach that
questioning age that they are going to take their child to church, regardless
of the fact that they, on their own, wouldn’t go, but they say, they want to give them a
spiritual base. Later they say, their child can choose what religion or not
they will follow.
As a former psychotherapist, I say this is the stuff the profession counts on for their bread and butter, that and childhood family
entanglements. Not to
worry, I would love to say to them, connect to your own dreams, teach
your children to connect to theirs, and not only will you feel confident that
you’ve given your child a spiritual terra firma, you’ll also have a lot of fun in the process and develop out of the ordinary communication with them, as well.
As in any other practice, yoga, tai chi chuan, dance,
playing an instrument, etc, you can't teach what you haven’t experienced
yourself. It’s a great idea for
parents to learn how to have an ongoing relationship with their own
dreams. I highly recommend
the innovative and practical approach Robert Moss presents in his books and DVD
series on Active Dreaming; it's the modern
shamanic approach to a dream practice.
His book, “The Three Only
Things” is a great
introduction to Active Dreaming, as is, quite humbly, the DVD series Jim and I
produced with him, The Way of the Dreamer. With a little guidance from veteran dream explorers to get you started, nothing
beats your own dream journal for the best tutorial on dreaming. I encourage parents to develop a dream practice so they can pass this great gift on as
soon as possible to their children.
Dreaming protects and sparks imagination, something we
desperately need in these creativity- numbing times of electronic entertainment. Do you think, when you’re
dead, you’ll still elect to spend hours of each day in front of a babbling box
of ever cascading images of the same thing? Or will you be out there doing the impossible, dancing and
singing your joy?
Flying?
We are not finite human beings; we are infinite spiritual
beings. Nothing ends; it’s never
over. It changes, that’s all. The good news of this brave new world
we are now living in is that consciousness studies and dream pioneering has
brought us to this new age of discovery, not an exploration of outer space, but
one of inner space. The 100th
monkey has got the picture; it’s time.
Dream time is as important as waking time. Help, as Robert likes to say, is always available to those
who ask, especially if they listen to the answers offered in dreams.
May your best dreams come true.
