How to be with a dream?

Dreams are profound mysteries. I don’t think we will ever really know the true expansive nature of dreams. We can talk about brain waves, the food you ate, what happened in your day… and all the blah-blah that is used to explain away or dismiss the remarkable treasures that await the individual and collective that leans into them. And when we do look at our dreams, we often look up what and image means in books written by authorities on the ineffable. To interpret or analyze a dream is looking at a dream, with the same intact consciousness that the dream is trying to change.

Dreams are not meant to be settled or colonized. The dream is alive, and to simply analyze them by deconstructing them is an act similar to using vivisection to understand “frogness”. The dream does not want to be understood, not by our minds. To do so makes the dream flat, and keeps the ego safely protected behind a wall of cognition. The dream is not a nut, waiting for our minds to crack. The dream, like a Zen koan, is meant to crack the nut that sits on our shoulders.

There are countless ways to approach a dream. Freud approached dreams by exploring associations found in the dream that reveal aspects of our past. He used the dreams to go back to the origins of a person and their complex. Jung amplified the dream through metaphor and archetypes to bring the psychic material into some form of completeness or conclusion. And yet there are still many mystical or “shamanic” ways or methods to engage with the dream.

Dreams are animate expressions of a collective experience, a larger sentience, where everything in the dream has not only meaning, but belongs in its ecology as a dynamic alive being with perspective, separate from you and me. And as we are an expression of the whole, everything is also a mirror of ourselves, a bit of a paradox.

Every detail of a dream is important, just as every detail of you or me, or every animal living on the planet is needed and important in order to know a dynamic resilient expression of wholeness. And just like the many animals, plants, trees and minerals and elements that comprise this planetary home, everything in a dream is more than a mental construct, but is hosted in a body. Yours, mine, theirs, and the somatic experience is often just as important, often more important, than the images they are tied to.

Dreams are timeless, granting access to past, present and future, and they didn’t just happen one night like some tv show, or a film strip wit a beginning, middle or end. They are happening to us right now. The body is always dreaming.

If you want to know a dream, go into it, lose yourself in the spell of he dream, and let it happen to you.

See the resources tab for more helpful methods of tending your own dreams.