Category Archives: Dreams

Dream skills, Dreams, Spirituality

If the doors of perception were cleansed

12 Comments

To round off my blog birthday celebrations, here is ‘the one that got away’ – an article about my spiritual path of dreams which was published on another blog earlier in the year  

When people talk about dreams as spiritual experience, they usually seem to be thinking in terms of what Jung called ‘numinous’ dreams – that is, dreams which have an unmistakably spiritual quality, inspiring awe and wonder, and often bringing revelations.

These ‘big’ dreams do indeed feel like wonderful gifts from outside the self, and they stay vividly with you across the decades, lighting your life. But dreams which feel quite ordinary can also be a doorway to profound changes in consciousness.

 

For example, I once dreamt I was having coffee with my neighbour. I was fully aware that I was dreaming – lucidity is very common in experienced dreamers.

Normally, in lucid dreams, my waking ‘I’ might be there as an observer or commentator, and occasionally if I didn’t like the way things were going, I might intervene and change the action of the dream.

But this dream didn’t have any action at all. It didn’t have any narrative to distract me – I was just sitting there, drinking coffee, and I was bored. There was a silky cushion beside me, and I ran my hand absent-mindedly across it. I noticed how smooth the fabric felt; I ran my fingers along the hard ridge of the trim.

I thought, ‘Hold on a minute – this is a dream!’ Since nothing much else was going on, I went on testing the evidence of my senses and yes, I really could smell the coffee; I really could feel the crumbly biscuit between my fingers and taste its light vanilla on my tongue. I could hear my neighbour’s voice, talking to me. I knew it was a dream, but it felt exactly the same as ‘real’ life.

 

When I woke up, I could feel the quilt resting lightly across my body; I could see the light from the gap in the curtains ribboning across it; I could hear my husband’s gentle breathing and smell the warmth of our two bodies. But now I knew that my mind could create a whole different reality which felt as real to my senses as this one. So the senses were unreliable witnesses, and waking life a reality no more substantial than the dream.

When you read back over old dream diaries, you will also find that seemingly ordinary dreams can be precisely predictive, and you may find so many of these that it’s impossible to dismiss them all as flukes and coincidences.

According to our normal understanding of time, it should not be possible to predict the future, but the experience of predictive dreaming shows irrefutably that it is.

So gradually, actively engaging with dreams can dissolve the narrow rational and materialistic viewpoint, through which we normally understand life. In the words of William Blake, ‘man has closed himself up, ’til he sees things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.’

The practical, experiential path of dreaming can lead to a falling-away of ideas and illusions, and open you up to the mind-blowing reality. ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.’

        

Dreams, Writing

Why would an author want to write a blog?

20 Comments

This week, I’m celebrating a whole year of Writing in the House of Dreams.

I asked fuelyourblogging – a really useful site for bloggers – for an end-of-year assessment, and they said

Your blog is a great example of balancing both a personal focus and a focus on others with similar experiences. As a writer, I see a lot of value and insight on your blog that I can use on my own path, so I’m engaged right off the bat.

The personal stories add that unique perspective people look for, as mentioned above.

Keep up the great work!

Woo hoo! *happy dance*

‘Writing in the House of Dreams’ has a hundred fantastic followers, including some who bring in lots of casual visitors through tweeting about my posts and sharing on facebook (special big huge thank-you – you know who you are!)

But writing a blog is undeniably very time-consuming, and for an author that’s time doing your normal work, but without getting paid. So why would an author want to write a blog?

The short answer is, because it’s a whole new adventure in writing. It might take time away from your work-in-progress, but it doesn’t take away any writing-time.

The time I spend writing my blog makes the writer-in-me feel happy because

  1. It have total creative freedom – there’s no pressure to try and make what I write here attractive to a mass market
  2. I get instant feedback from readers – this has given me many insights, especially through people sharing their personal stories
  3. It brings me the generous gift of guest posts from some fabulous interesting people
  4. Its reach is global – I have readers from every continent, some of them reading my blog in translation
  5. It engages me in the blogosphere as a reader – I’ve discovered some great new writers and had lots of interactions on other people’s blogs
  6. It makes me engage more fully with networks such as twitter, linkedin and facebook – which I enjoy

I’m going to tweet and fb one of my fave posts each day this week, as part of my blog birthday celebrations.

So gather round, dear friends, grab a glass and help yourselves to a slice of virtual cake… and thank you for coming to the party 🙂

Archetypes, Dreams, Psychology, Spirituality, Symbols

Dream gateways – how the gods get in

10 Comments

I was talking last week about the faceless ones in my dreams, figures who had no individual characteristics but represented the pure power of the archetype. Other words for these pure powers might be energies, or spirits.

When peoples throughout the ages have sought to engage with these spirits, they have given them faces and names. Different traditions choose different faces and names, according to their culture, to represent the same essential qualities.

So, for example, in Ancient Greece Demeter was the goddess of harvest, but in Ancient Egypt this essence of harvest/mother/nature was called Isis.

After my first encounters with the faceless ones, I began to dream about gods and goddesses. Often, their names were unfamiliar to me in waking life, so it felt as if I was dipping a deeper stream. This experience will be familiar to a lot of dreamers, of words we have no conscious knowledge of coming to us for the first time in dreams.

One night I dreamt that Thoth was in my study. I had a vague notion that Thoth sounded like some kind of devil, so it spooked me. But when I looked him up, I found he was, amongst other things, the Ancient Egyptian god of scribes. The universal spirit of writing, in the shape of Thoth, had taken up residence in my writing room. Sweet!

A week later, by a happy synchronicity, I found a figurine of Thoth in a seaside nick-nacks shop, amongst the beach mats and sunglasses. I brought him home and now, if I ever feel disheartened or directionless as a writer, he inspires me with the pure power of writing.

Have you ever dreamt about gods, goddesses or other religious symbols?

Archetypes, Dreams, Spirituality, Symbols

Dreaming the faceless ones

12 Comments

I first discovered the concept of archetypes in the early seventies, when I was starting to try and understand my dreams. At that time, there were few books about symbols, and most of them were not very accessible to the general reader.

My symbols dictionary gave ‘archetype’ meanings for some symbols, which I found completely puzzling. Why did some symbols have two definitions, and which one should I apply to my individual dream?

Because my dictionary only offered archetypal meanings for certain symbols, I thought some symbols were archetypes and some were not; it was only a decade later that I began to understand the archetypal as a layer of meaning behind everything. Just as behind every object in waking life there are layers of personal symbolic significance, so beyond that there are layers of group/cultural/universal meaning.

Jung said you could not understand archetypes in a theoretical way; they were ‘pieces of life itself’, which you could only understand through direct experience. My first experience of archetypes was in my dreams.

I thought of them as the faceless ones, because they seemed to have no individual identity, they were generic – an old man, an old woman, a baby; a doctor, a teacher, a guide. These dream figures had a different quality about them – I felt drawn to them because of their mystery.

I gradually understood that these faceless figures represented the pure spirit of , say, wisdom or adventure, healing or learning. Meeting them showed me how the archetypes worked in more ordinary dream figures – if I dreamt about a friend who was a doctor, for example, he would be appearing both as himself, as what he personally represents to me and also as the universal figure of the healer.

The faceless ones gave me experience of archetypal energies at work in my dreams, and this layer of meaning brought deeper resonance to every dream experience, and every part of daily life.

The encounter with the archetypes is a spiritual experience, and I’ll be exploring that idea in my post next week.

Creativity, Dreams, Spirituality, Writing

Do you have a daily practice?

28 Comments

Many of the best books on writing, and pretty much every book on dreaming, recommend establishing a daily practice.

The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, and Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande, both propose the idea of ‘morning pages’ – setting aside half an hour first thing in the morning to write stream-of-consciousness, before your mind gets distracted by the mundane  concerns of the day.

The wonderful Writing down the Bones, by Nathalie Goldberg, develops this idea, comparing writing with Buddhist meditation practice.

The daily practice approach focuses on the process of writing rather than the products. It’s not instead of your books and stories, but as well; it’s the seed-bed from which your finished creative pieces grow. 

In the same way, writing down any dreams and dream fragments you remember upon waking isn’t just about big dreams and insights – it’s about deepening your awareness of the continuous dream-life that runs parallel with your life in the dayworld.

As with morning pages, you have to set aside value judgements and simply write, whatever comes, because that’s how you find and develop the authentic writer or dreamer that you are.

Betty Edwards, in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, says it doesn’t make any difference what you do – the point of any daily practice is the experience of ‘flow.’ Knitting, jogging and gardening are all a form of meditation, as are writing and other creative activities.

Anything in which you are able to lose yourself and the world, will change and enrich your life, and doing it every day makes this out-of-time experience part of you; it grounds you in something bigger than yourself.

Do you have a daily practice? What are its benefits in your life?

Creativity, Dreams, Guest posts, Writing

Guest post: The worlds where dreams may take us

10 Comments

Flying with Fairies, by Bob Cherny

Bob Cherney

We can analyze our dreams for what they say about us, fear them for what they might mean, take them for more than they are, merely enjoy them or follow them into the worlds where they may take us.

My book “Flying with Fairies” is this last. Born of a single brilliant full-color image, the first chapter turned into a second and then into a novel and then into a series. This book was a departure from what I had written previously and is unlike anything I have written since. But then, the dream that inspired it stood out from the other dreams for its visual clarity and symbolic obscurity. It was an opportunity to be exploited and a challenge to be faced. It spoke of pleasure and of hard work at the same time.

“Gatorbait”, a short story published in a Florida based regional publication, was also based on a single image. Where “Fairies” was based on a mid-air collision between a fairy and a flying human, “Gatorbait” was based on a young rodeo competitor and her flying horse.

I have a first chapter of a spy thriller that was so completely formed in my mind when I woke up, I could wait two days before writing it down. I have no idea what I will do with that chapter, but it’s there in case of whatever.

Everyone dreams, but remembering and exploiting dreams takes a willingness to step into a place where few of us are comfortable going. If you wish to write, go there. Take the risk. Exorcise the demons by writing them down and capturing them on the printed page where they can no longer do you any harm.

Do not work for your dreams. Make them work for you.

http://stagewalker.embarqspace.com/

My thanks to Bob for this glimpse into a wonderful dreaming and writing life, and for his insightful comments about exorcising personal demons by capturing them on the printed page. 

How do you make your dreams work for you?

Creativity, Dreams, Spirituality

Depression, dreams and the creative life

24 Comments

A few weeks ago, I heard author Matthew Johnstone talking about his experience of depression on the BBC World Service, and it got me thinking about the link between depression, dreams and the creative life.

Strikingly, Matthew said he would not change anything – his depression was part of him. Rather than try to kill the black dog, he had learnt how to tame it.

Matthew Johnstone’s book

In the West, we treat depression as an illness, a malfunction in the brain which needs to be cured with chemicals or brought under control by psychological explanations.

Depression challenges all our cultural values. It makes us antisocial in a world where naturally solitary types are labelled ‘poorly socialised’; it makes us still, in a world of manic activity.

Depression stops us from having what we want – which boils down to happiness – and we believe we should always be able to get what we want, because this is a secular world. Without God/fate/mystery, we expect to have control over our own lives.

Nobody would choose to feel depressed, but that is precisely the opportunity depression brings. It brings us to a standstill on our chosen track and, by stopping us from having what we think we want, it opens us up to something new and unexpected. It makes our life bigger.

It’s a well-documented fact that people dream more during periods of depression. Often these dreams are particularly vivid and memorable; they release a torrent of new images which, if we pay attention, can open doorways into new places of the mind, and inspire new directions in life. The loss of these life-giving dreams may be one of the most harmful side-effects of antidepressant drugs.

Many writers label their depression as ‘writer’s block.’ Suddenly the story they thought they had all planned out is stalled, or they can’t find any ideas for the next one. But this is the gift of the black dog for writers – it forces you to be still and receptive, so that new insights and inspirations can come in.

Writer’s block is simply impatience, which means literally the inability to tolerate suffering, delay, toil or vexation (from the Latin word meaning ‘to bear’)

Depression can feel dark and frightening, like a big black dog, but kicking him will make him mean. Don’t try to kill him, but don’t underestimate him either – if he hangs around your house, you need to tame him.

I think the black dog is a special danger for children and young people, before life has given them the perspective of time or put support systems in place. That’s why I wrote my children’s book, ‘How 2B Happy’, in which the very first principle is that we can’t be happy all the time; we have to accept unhappiness. But we can deal with it, and discover what gifts it brings.

In my last two posts, I’ve been talking about synchronicity, and needless to say several blog posts on dreams and depression have come to my attention this week. Toko-pa has written a passionate piece here, in which she talks about ‘the intelligence of our melancholia’ http://toko-pa.com/2007/03/08/bleed-joyfully-a-fresh-view-of-depression/#comment-497 You might also enjoy this piece from ispeakindreams http://ispeakindreams.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/the-beauty-of-our-dreams-healing-within-dreams/

Has a period of depression ever led to a breakthrough for you?

Creativity, Dreams

Guest post: The dream that became a fairy-tale

7 Comments

How a Dream Became a Fairy Tale – by Juanita Havill

I’ve kept dream journals for years and they provide inspiration, characters, and plots. One in particular, about a glass bed, led easily into a story…

The boy I was babysitting didn’t want to go to sleep. “I’m afraid,” he protested. He balked. I insisted. Still he wouldn’t move. So naturally I turned to an alternate bed, that is, a glass bed. I don’t recall exactly why I had the glass bed with me, but what a relief!

As soon as I rolled the heavy glass bed into his bedroom, he lay on it, stretched out, and fell asleep without the comfort of sheets, pillow, or blanket.

The headboard of the bed impressed me mightily. Thick glass, it was carved with images of children, youths, deer, rabbits, and foxes. I watched him snooze for a while to make sure that he was not feigning sleep. The warm glow from the little boy’s night light illuminated the glass carvings. Satisfied, I woke up.

I don’t always wake up from dreams satisfied. Often times I’m anxious, puzzled, or fearful, but not this time. I wrote a quick account of the dream in my journal, and a few years later I turned the dream into a short tale for a children’s magazine and “The Glass Bed” was published.

Such is the waking mind that the story became a fairy tale in which a young prince refuses to go to bed at night and neither king nor queen nor princess nor court wizard can come up with a solution.

Although the court jester’s idea of a glass bed is scoffed at, finally the transparent bed with its solid glass headboard is installed in the prince’s room.

The prince continues to have frightening dreams, but because he is no longer alone, he is able to sleep. Why isn’t he alone? Because everyone at court crowds into his bedroom to watch the prince’s scary dreams projected across the glass headboard.

Dreams, Interpretation, Symbols

What was that dream about?

4 Comments

In ‘Take the bones and build a story’ I suggested a way of stripping back a dream to its basic theme or emotion and using that as a starting-point for creating new fiction.

The reason why dreams can energise and inspire your writing is because many of them reflect an emotional situation or dilemma which is current in your waking life, whether you are consciously aware of it or not.

For the same reason, stripping dreams down to the bones can provide clues as to what they are about, if their meaning is not immediately obvious.

Reducing a dream to the ‘someone is doing/feeling something’ format – ‘someone is making a stand… someone doesn’t like what they’re seeing… someone is being reckless…’ –  will often reveal a connection with something that’s going on in your waking life.

Recently, I dreamt I was walking on a path with a huge expanse of water on one side and a rushing river on the other. I was feeling happy and excited. I stopped to look down at the river and saw that it was full of fish – some tiny, others very big.

I stepped into the water and paddled out a little way. The current was strong, and the water was up to the top of my wellies. Some people on the far side were tut-tutting, saying it wasn’t safe, but I didn’t feel in any danger.

I reduced this dream to, ‘Someone is somewhere amazing… someone is feeling happy… someone should be feeling scared…’

At the time, in my day-life, I had just delivered my dream book, and I knew it might be the start of a big shift in my writing life. It felt exciting. But maybe a small voice somewhere was saying, shouldn’t you be feeling a bit more worried?!

Reducing dreams to their themes is what the kind of interpretation book which doesn’t fix on symbols, but rather on situations does – ‘Ten common dreams and what they mean’ sort of thing.

‘The Universal Dream Key’ by Patricia Garfield- subtitle, ‘The 12 most common dream themes around the world’
Most dreams about falling, for example, would reduce to ‘someone is feeling insecure/afraid’ and therefore they will usually reflect a waking-life situation in which the dreamer is feeling insecure.

Most dreams about being chased will reduce to ‘someone is running away from something… someone is feeling scared…’ Most dreams about shopping will come down to  ‘someone is making a choice/considering their options…’

You can check whether these stock interpretations are right for your particular dream by thinking about how you felt in the dream situation. Not all dreams about falling indicate insecurity, even if most do. You may have had a feeling of release and liberation as you plunged over the cliff!

Not all dreams about being chased will be negative – you may be the world’s fastest runner, and loving that your pursuer hasn’t any chance of catching you. Or of course, you might rather hope that the person chasing you will catch you.

The wonderful thing about dream interpretation is that one size does not fit all. Experts and commentators can suggest useful ways in, but only the dreamer can hear how the dream fits in the full symphony of the heart.