Category Archives: Dream skills

Creativity, Dream skills, Dreams

Do you dream about your job?

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A friend of mine made an interesting comment in facebook last week, in response to my post about the ants on the rat.

She said, ‘Since working at the vet’s, I am having a lot of animal dreams!!!! Am just thinking of places I wouldn’t want to work!!!’

I hadn’t really given much thought to work-related dreams, probably at least in part because most of my job these days consists of day-dreaming.

But I straight away realised that lots of people do report having workplace-related dreams, and not just big-ticket dreams about interviews or major projects; often these dreams feel like a continuation of everyday routines.

 

It struck me that this could be a double whammy, if you were doing a job that didn’t fire you and then having dreams about it that didn’t fire you either.

Which brought me to the wider question – is one way of making your dream-life more satisfying by trying to inject more fun and challenges into the day? I’ve seen this suggestion in a number of dream books over the years, but never felt convinced by it.

It seems to me that although the things of the dayworld are undeniably reflected in dreams, the practical, objective, outer life is very much the minor part of what the dayworld is. You can have a waking life which seems narrow and small, with very little variety and travel, yet your dream life be rich and amazing.

The day world is much more than external events; it is also the inner world of ideas and imagination, and dreams reflect the objects and qualities of both outer and inner daytime experience.

Therefore, although working at the vet’s might make me dream more about animals, so might reading animal stories or surrounding myself with animal pictures.

And if I got my nightmare job, taking the money in a toll booth say, then maybe listening to adventure stories on the ipod or grabbing a few pages in quiet times or jotting down ideas in my breaks might save me from dreaming, ‘One-fifty, please… thank you… one fifty please… thank-you…’

This suddenly makes me think of William Carlos Williams scribbling his poems on the back of a prescription pad between patients.

Confession coming up.

I didn’t have a medical problem when I was working in my various ‘proper’ jobs… I had the lid down, reading!

Dream skills, Dreams

Flying dreams – are you a leaper or a flapper?

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When you tell someone you’re working on a book about dreams an interesting thing happens – instead of the polite, interested look they get when you talk about your other assorted writing projects their face lights up and they straight away tell you about a dream they’ve had.

I’ve experienced this heaps of times since I’ve been writing my dream book, but my absolute favourite was one night at the pub after choir practice.

Someone asked me what I was working on, I told them, and they straight away remarked that they often dreamt about flying dogs. Someone else, overhearing, said that he didn’t much like dreaming about flying because it was always such hard work, all that flapping.

‘Flapping?’ a fourth person joined in. ‘Why don’t you go to a high place and glide? That’s what I do!’

‘I usually just float up,’ said someone else.

I had very little to report on the topic of flying dreams because I’ve only ever had one or two in my life, and I didn’t get much higher than the tops of the streetlamps and trees. Also, I have absolutely no idea how I achieved lift-off.

I love hearing about other people’s dreams! So what’s your recommended method when it comes to flying – are you a leaper or a flapper?

Creativity, Dream skills, Dreams, Writing

How to incubate a dream

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Last week, in the comments, Abi said she wished she could visit her dream house more often, and I suggested she might try incubating a dream.

Creative dreaming is all about ‘flying on the wings of intent,’ to borrow a phrase from Carlos Casteneda. Setting an intention is how we start to establish regular dream-recall, as I explain here https://jenalexanderbooks.wordpress.com/tips/

Once we have begun to experience regular recall, we can use intention in the same way, to incubate a dream on a particular topic. I sometimes do this with a group.

The first time I did it, I asked my workshop participants to intend to dream about a tree. Of the six people in that group, five reported tree dreams the following week.

Two people dreamt about saplings, and another about ‘baby trees.’ I dreamt about a tree-lined avenue. The fifth person, frustrated by a marked no-show of trees for the first few nights, wrote a poem about a tree to help set her intention, and then dreamt she was on a ranch in America, where she saw a single tree in the distance which looked like a child’s drawing of a tree.

This person thought, either in her dream or upon waking – she couldn’t tell which – ‘There was a tree!’ The same thing happened in my dream, where I thought, ‘Ooh… lots of trees!’

This is the waking ‘I’ being aware during the dream, and an interesting bonus of dream-incubation is that you’re likely to become lucid at the point where the dream meets the conscious expectation.

I incubate dreams to resolve plot problems and develop my writing ideas, as well as to gain insights into anything which might be bothering me in my everyday life.

If you want to try it, think about your dream intention at points throughout the day, affirming, ‘Tonight, I will dream about…’ Repeat your intention as you go to sleep.

You can reinforce your intention by writing it down, or drawing an image to represent it. Promise yourself that you will record any and every dream you recall when you wake up.

This last point is important. If you don’t automatically record everything, your conscious rational mind can click in too early and push your dreams away.

Besides, if you’ve asked for a dream, it would feel rude not to note down the answer. The dream will not co-operate if it thinks you’re just messing around.