Being a full time dream explorer means straddling two worlds. Not in a split personality way that threatens to dissolve a healthy ego, but as a practice of balancing two realities. We live in a multi-dimensional universe; physics and modern spiritual teachings agree. This is most obvious when you follow a regular dream practice, remembering and journaling dreams frequently. After countless dream experiences have provided significant help and teaching; a person realizes that waking reality is only one side of the existence coin. What we're learning as dreamers is that there is a way to balance these multi-realities so that the most feared hazard, loss of sanity, is not an issue. As Jesus said, "render unto Caesar what belongs to Caeser." Pay attention to the waking world; take it seriously and do what you can. But we are visitors here; each of our individual lives is much, much broader in experience and potential if we can accept who we are. We are spiritual beings having a physical experience, and not for the first time. Every physical experience is rooted in the primal source of physical being, spiritual being.
The option a dream practice offers for living in this reality is to do it with respect, but without seeing it as the ultimate reality. It isn't. The ultimate reality is that we are forever and we are evolving. Towards what; each of us decides. My vote? Towards beings who know that Love is the Answer.
I may be wrong. If I am; I'll find out when I die. If I'm not, then the best is yet to come! And although I've reached this conclusion based on my own dreaming experience, countless respected modern scholars teach the same thing. This is only one aspect of my journey, so I don't need to lose myself in it. The perspective dreaming gives me is a life line in the fluid ocean of occurence that is physical existence and that life line is knowing that this is temporary - temporal.
The power of your dreaming mind is that it allows you to live life truly large, on many levels at once. What happens during the waking day is no more or less important than what happens in my dreams. Through my dream practice I can bi-locate, I can enjoy my waking adventures and I can live wonderful adventures in dreaming realities simultaneously, on a regular basis. How much would you pay for that technology if Apple came up with it?
We are born with a powerful dreaming mind. Humanity has always payed attention to dreaming, as depicted in dramatic cave paintings found in the south of France from some 40,000 years ago. Humanity's dreaming can be traced back through every known ancient civilization; the Egyptians and the Greeks dedicated temples to healing through dreams. Humanity's connection to dreaming was thrwarted for about the last 2,000 years, for reasons I've discussed before and no doubt will again. Still, we haven't strayed far. The gates of dreaming were held open by visionaries like Carl Jung. Dreaming always brings us home again, and even during the most ignorant of those dreamless years, dreaming offered a portal to sanity to anyone who payed attention.
The power of the dreaming mind is that it requires little to tap into it; it's organic. Each of us is born with the connection, each of us lives with that connection. Some have been conditioned to view dreams as delusional and to be ignored, others believe they don't have time in their busy lives to pay attention to dreams, but everyone I've seen open to dreaming, changes that opinion quickly. All it takes to realize the power of your dreaming is to pay attention to it. When we're acclimated to the "waking treadmill" of work, struggle, stress and entertainment, we can miss the option we have of altering that unilateral existence, if we want to. Dreaming shines a light on the unconscious forces that drive us, sometimes controlling our egos; it helps us stay connected to our spiritual core, what Jung called the Self or some call the Higher Self.
As we experimentally open the doors to a dreaming awareness, we find that there's more to us than meets the I (the ego); we open ourselves to exploring the exhilirating reality of living on more than one dimension at once. Mono-dimensional thinking leads to limitation and depression; multi-dimensional thinking leads to engagement, adventure and hope.
I propose that the power of the dreaming mind is to liberate each of us from slavish thinking and negative projections; what you can dream, can exist in waking reality. According to John Perkins, one valuable lesson he learned from the South American shamans who taught him is that "the world is as you dream it." The world, Perkins says, is as it is because someone dreamt it this way and others continue to consent in allowing that dream reality. It just takes someone, or many, to dream it differently and transform what once was to what I want it to be. That's the challenge of the dreaming mind. Once we learn to use it; it's no longer confined to dreaming dimensions; it helps us create in waking reality, as well.
