Pictures on My Eyelids

A Jungian Approach to Dreaming

By JOSEPHINE EVETTS-SECKER

In diverse languages, the common experience of dreaming is verbalized differently: I saw a dream; I made a dream; I received a dream; a dream came to me. ”I saw pictures on my eyelids” is how one child described their visual interiority, inner pictures watched when eyes are closed. Of course, though dreams are predominantly visual, many offer smells and sounds and palpable textures. They are seen and remembered in color, in black and white, and sometimes, quite specially, in sepia. Intriguing though this child’s naïve report is, I begin with a more sophisticated statement by Jung, who spent his professional life sharing the dreams of his numberless local and international patients.

If our dreams reproduce certain ideas, these ideas are primarily our ideas, in the structure of which our whole being is interwoven. They are subjective factors, grouping themselves as they do in the dream, and expressing this or that meaning, not for extraneous reasons, but from the most intimate promptings of our psyche. The whole dreamwork is essentially subjective, and a dream is a theatre in which the dreamer is himself the scene, the player, the prompter, the producer, the author, the public, and the critic. ¹

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This idea of a theatre of the mind is ancient, but Jung used it with new psychological insight to enter into individual experiences of multifaceted dream situations and figures. When responding to dreams, one needs to acknowledge every facet as an aspect of the dreaming subject. I am the landscape, the tree, the ripe and the fallen fruit, the orchard’s owner and worker and the basket into which the apples are gathered; I am the prison and the door, the lock and the key, and the guard with whom I am pleading; I am the nursing mother, the suckling infant and the enfolding blanket. (Such motifs as these come from dreams brought to me by my analysands). None of these components can be separated from the dreaming subject; and no symbol dictionary or set of predictions can reliably respond to a dream separated from its specific dreamer. For this reason, there is no definite or straightforward interpretation of any dream.² Each dream detail presents “intimate promptings of our psyche”.

Jung distinguished between objective and subjective responses to dream material. In the former, people, places and situations might refer specifically to historical, biographical reality, bringing to consciousness something being missed, refused or denied in conscious, outer life. These prompts are clearly extremely helpful, even revelatory, helping us to create or restore inner balance, for this is one of the dream’s major tasks. Jung sees the human psyche as a self-regulating system, working towards balance between consciousness and the darker unknowns of unconscious depths. ‘Psyche’ represents the totality of all psychic processes, conscious and unconscious. The goal of human development is wholeness, which can only be achieved by communication and relationship between both domains, both levels of psychic functioning. Unconscious information comes to the sphere of consciousness by means of symbolic images. They reveal a precise and infinitely rich eco-system. Dreams that can be experienced as objective representation reflect vital needs for change, development, adjustment of attitude and so on. Jung speaks of “tendencies which in conscious life are too little valued [that] come spontaneously into action during the sleeping state, when the conscious process is to a large extent eliminated.” ³ But what of responses at the subjective level?

First, I share a dream experience that illuminates this process. A dreamer was deeply involved in a training program and was anxious about moving on to the next stage because she felt inadequately prepared. She felt blocked, even wondering whether to move in a completely different direction. She felt unready. At a crucial moment in decision making she had a brief but vivid dream. A large frog suddenly jumped out of the wardrobe in her bedroom, announced its name, “Wump”, and hopped away. It felt absurd and even childish, so silly that she didn’t take it very seriously. It was hardly comparable to Einstein’s Alpine cows! But the image would not leave her alone. Eventually she honored it enough to reflect on her experience of frogs, part of a process of amplification that Jung advocates. She had vivid memories of childhood ponds, and of being enchanted by frogspawn floating in clumps, then watching emerging tadpoles until they disappeared. Later she saw the odd frog and wondered how many of those previous wrigglers had made it to this next stage. She remembered biology lessons at the age of twelve when the life cycle of frogs was studied. She remembered more recent encounters with fairy tales, especially when frogs promised barren queens that they would bear a child. The frog wouldn’t leave her; what she found most insistent was a strange sense of mystery. She later identified this as the quality of the numinous, the experience of numinosity that imbues certain images with an almost sacred archetypal charge. Without this dynamism the absurd cupboard-frog would have been dismissed as trivial, soon disappearing from her imagination. But as harbinger of new possibilities, it exercised tremendous influence, moving her forward. This kind of experience supports the idea of the symbol as an energy transformer, bringing hitherto lost momentum to empower the conscious ego. This experience made her realize that in fact, we do not work on our dreams, to interpret them, but they work on us, to change us. What we have to do, as James Hillman urges, is simply to befriend them, allow them into consciousness to complete their task of psychological adjustment and realization. This ‘silly’ dream speaks of the capacity of the unconscious psyche to juxtapose heterogeneous elements in paradoxical ways. Nothing is impossible and nothing is too absurd in dream narrative. Men have babies; angels perform heart surgery; toy tin soldiers attack tax inspectors. In sleep we live naively and without surprise in odd and upsidedown worlds. I am reminded of a wonderful comment by the analyst-philospher, Adam Phillips, who pointed out the sad fact that very quickly, psychoanalysis became a “science of sensible passions”, as though the goal of therapy was “to make people more intelligible to themselves rather than to realize how strange they are.” ⁴ Our dreams do not fear strangeness or mystery. The amphibian frog is an apt soul-guide, threshold creature able to move between water and land, and able to function in both elements.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

Jung insisted that the human psyche is a self-regulating system that maintains its equilibrium just as the body does. Every process that goes too far, inevitably evokes compensations. For Jungians, this theory of compensation is a basic law of psychic behaviour and is a central purpose of dreaming. Jung’s early mentor, Freud, wrote specifically on dream interpretation, but Jung used this term more hesitantly, seeing the core of each individual as a “mystery of life, which is snuffed out when it is ‘grasped.’” That is why symbols want to be mysterious: they are not so merely because what is at the bottom of them cannot be clearly apprehended.” ⁵

Without interpreting “Wump”, I need to take him more seriously. From the objective perspective, he brought associations from the dreamer’s personal unconscious, facts and memories from a specific childhood in a specific culture, bringing with it the excitements of early discoveries of the natural world around her; stirring that first sense of the mystery of creativity and her first awareness of a process of things changing into other things, only later understood as transformation and metamorphosis. These ideas and emotions, powerful in themselves, were urging her to move on to the next stage. But there was more to the experience than this, another element that explained the even deeper charge that kept the silly frog alive in her psyche … perhaps for ever. There was another dynamic at work. The frog also brought with it centuries of implication and association from various cultures, carrying universal significances. These are the echoes and valences of what Jung called the collective unconscious that underlies and enriches personal histories, a means of “thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are older than the historical man, which are inborn in him from the earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche.”⁶ To live fully, we must be in harmony with these symbols.

At this level of illumination for the dreamer, energies of the fertility goddesses of the ancient world are activated. For example, in ancient Japanese and North American native mythologies, the frog carries power to fertilize and transform. Frogs proliferated in the mud of the flooding Nile and heralded fertility. Heket, goddess of childbirth and creation was depicted as a frog; midwives were her servants. Associated with abundance and fruitfulness, the hieroglyph for the tadpole represented the amount/number 100,000. This symbol-cluster brings expectation of prospective life. The dreamer felt animated by such future promise in the present psychological situation. She must move on and felt energized to do so, even though she understood little of all the above at the time.

Of course, she was also conscious of fantasies such as C.S. Lewis’ land of Narnia, which was entered via a wardrobe, a liminal space between worlds. But this frog, a most humble soul-guide, was not leading her into the wardrobe’s dark depths, but emerging from it and leading her elsewhere, perhaps to moist mosses around ponds where soul might be refreshed. The energy of these symbolic images and residues keep us in contact with the archetypal realm, habitual patterns and structures of human behaviour and functioning, shared from unconscious and archaic stores.

The dynamism of futurity is central to the Jungian approach to the dream. It is essentially teleological, moving towards psychic goals unavailable to the conscious Ego except by means of symbolic illumination from unconscious sources. This prospective function directs how we respond to dream prompting, the announcing of things unknown. These are precious moments when we acknowledge Jung’s own experience of the “impenetrable”, mysterious world that erupts into our personal and transitory one. ⁷ This offers us religious experience, keeping us in relationship, connecting us, religere, with that which is eternal, even as we sleep.

A vital task of dreaming is also to bring to consciousness not only our positive capacities that need to be owned and developed further, perhaps hitherto neglected, but also the dark part of our personalities that we manage to disown and deny, often by projecting our un-acceptable qualities onto other human beings who carry the darkness for us. This is often painful, to acknowledge our own hidden, undesirable selves and we can avoid doing so except in unusually challenging moments of solitary introspection. But much more vividly and ruthlessly, the unconscious psyche will compel us to see those shadowy parts in dream drama. Jung reflected that “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”⁸ Wise words. Ominous dream figures who can threaten our inner peace of mind and sense of self are often taken from our daily relationships, usually the people who infuriate or disgust us. Dreams will re-organize and re-imagine our relationships to these carriers of unowned self. Our task is to own and stay conscious of them as part-selves, to be reckoned with, not refused or destroyed. They may be darker, terrifying archetypal creatures or historical tyrants. Many post WWII dreams have horrified people with the reality of their own hidden prejudices and their capacities to hate and to persecute, confronting them with a secret, well-hidden Nazi figure within. One such dreamer had to come face to face with a Gestapo officer crouching in anguish in the inmost centre of a dream maze. Such experiences are chastening and promote self-knowledge, fulfilling the demands of the individuation process, the coming into psychic wholeness. Such is the purposiveness of dream work, using symbolic forms, the rich and most comprehensive expressions of things as yet unknown to the conscious personality.

As I have proposed, it is important to contextualize symbolic elements in the life and history of the dreamer before moving to deeper collective depths. This is illuminated by experiences such as the following, concerning two powerfully archaic animal symbols, the snake and the cat.

The first was presented in a training seminar in which a group of analytical psychologists were discussing dream work/play. A dream was presented in which the dream-ego was weaving snakes to create a wall inside a house, like a wicker fence perhaps. Not much else was remembered … it had been offered in a rather apologetic way by the dreamer, as “merely a fragment”. There was much excitement as members of the seminar took the snake and ran with it; back to the Biblical Genesis, to Egypt’s serpent goddess, to archaic alchemical imagery, the Greek god Hermes, the Asclepian healing rituals and the Caduceus … on and on … skin shedding as rebirth, the ouroboros as symbol of eternity and completion, energy and life force. The sacredness of the snake as symbol of all the above was shared with satisfaction and passion. The exchanges suddenly ended, very quietly, all participants feeling rather strangely moved by both attraction and repulsion … the ancient response to the transcendent … the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. The dream snake had brought about this final acquiescent stillness after all the intellectual energy of wide-ranging amplification. Snake did this, as it often does.

This was a salutary process; eventually the action of the dream symbol wrought its effect, stilling souls. But no-one had asked about the life-situation of the dreamer. This is crucial … to explore the personal human context. The analysand was a white South African who had spent numberless expeditions into the wilderness, where snakes of many kinds were seen and related to. No matter how commonly encountered, and seen in their native habitat, the snake’s power over and for him had never diminished. The live experiences the dream brought to consciousness, enhancing a sense of how he might live more creatively and in a more natural environment than he was currently living, brought urgency to his situation and the stage of life he had reached. After reflecting for some time on these vital issues, we felt a similar awe to that of D.H. Lawrence, in his poem, ‘Snake’. This introduced a further layer of amplification, through the energies evoked in and by the dream. In the background was the poet’s responses: “I felt so honoured”, I “stared with fascination”, and having wilfully and regretfully hastened the snake’s disappearance, he realized that he “had missed [his] chance with one of the Lords of life”. Only after the personal associations were amplified was it important to consider universal, archetypal and mythic synergies. These emanate from the collective unconscious, enriching and expanding the individual’s connection to eternal images of the human psyche. This is Jung’s “religere”, leaving the waking dreamer with residues of numinosity, a sense of something “totally other” to daytime consciousness that had been bestowed.

If this snake dream had been experienced by an urban citizen who may only ever have seen a snake in a zoo, or only in pictures; or if it had come to someone (and there many such) who suffered from a snake phobia … response to the image would have to be very different from that felt for the snake-weaving dreamer. The dream snakes would carry very different psychic implications. Yet in phobic terror, there would also be awe. The onset of the phobia may be brought to consciousness by the dream’s creature and some healing initiated through the process of remembering and bringing the fear into adult awareness. Allowing this terrifying creature into even a tentative relationship with the waking ego can have profound effects. This “Lord of life”, ancient symbol of renewal/rebirth might also bring to light a fear of engaging with life in a creative way, expressed by and through the phobia, thereby cutting off soul from its native power and richness.

The same thing happened in a similar dream seminar when a dream-cat appeared. After roaming the world in search of “Cat”, via Japan and Egypt where the Sun-god’s daughter was Cat-goddess, someone finally asked if the dreamer actually had such a pet. Yes, indeed. She had. But it had been run over by a car and killed the day preceding her dream. Clearly, this took the group to very different places; loving memories, loss, heartache and mourning; reliving childhood moments when the cat licked tears off her face, the only caring companion she felt she could love. But as always with such dream symbols, the collective experiences from other cultural contexts made this very personal material more compelling, giving substance to a hesitant but healing sense of sacredness.

Dreams call us into our own depths. They urge us to our soul’s health if we attend to them. That doesn’t mean “interpreting” them, but letting them into consciousness, to reflect and ponder their symbolic resonances. They offer “other” dimensions, drawing us away from daily ‘getting and spending’, or commenting on that very aspect of our lives, warning, challenging or affirming, in the light of, and with benefit to, the whole psychic system.

In the preceding dreams, I have used frog, snake and cat to lead into inner unknown soul territory. And I have emphasized a religious orientation, religious here not in any creedal or dogmatic form, but the speech of homo religiosus, Mircea Eliade’s useful designation. This version of ourselves, however admitted or accepted, intuits some capacity for, and intuition of, a transcendent reality that manifests itself in and beyond this world. It is responded to even when incapable of definition or rational identification. This innate sense of transcendent reality, balancing the exclusively physical realm, preserves meaning and gives value to earthly experience. The world’s myths share such imaginative truths and mysteries, enacting associated rituals that preserve perceptions of primitive and contemporary divinity and divinities. In a self-regulating psychic system, when we veer too far from our fundamentally religious nature, or lose touch with our deepest meaning frame of reference, dreams remind and regenerate, making use of symbols drawn from the collective depths to re-animate what is depleted or neglected. We reconnect with dismembered bits of self, integrating them in the present through re-membering calling into memory lost parts that have fallen into the personal unconscious. Exploring this will give sharper definition and purpose to the symbolic images from the collective unconscious that dreams bring to the surface.

It is vital to understand that symbols do not have a single meaning … there is no sense of exact equivalence. They are much more than signs. They want to remain mysterious and so they lose their force when explained or feel apprehended. But rather, the symbol brings with it numerous associations, feelings, intimations and intuitions, an ahistorical gallery of cultural images, experiences and emotions that connect us with lost instinctual life, and enables us to address the archaic and timeless human that is in all of us, receptive to symbols and living with and from the energy they generate in consciousness.

I end with suitably hesitant consideration of what Jung called the Self, far too large a subject to be treated in this way! In significant dreams, always imagined and imaged with feelings of numinosity, we can recognize very special symbols or symbolic situations or figures as carrying that fullness of human be-ing that is our calling. In struggling to get anywhere near defining the transformative Self of Jungian discourse, we can only appeal to that perception of the individual human being’s psychic totality, the wholeness towards which the earthly soul journeys, which may be symbolized by any thing or person that is felt to have a greater totality than the individual him/herself. The individual and individuating person hopes and dreams of somehow participating in this wholeness, though the humbled psychological ego finds itself like a mere drop of water in relation to the ocean.

NOTES
1 C. G. Jung. The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. Collected Works, Volume 8, p. 509
2 Man and his Symbols, p. 38
3 Jung. Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. C.W. 8, p. 466
4 Terrors and Experts: London: Faber & Faber, 1995. p. 87
5 Jung. The Practice of Psychotherapy. C.W. 16. p. 322
6 Jung. Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. C.W. Vol. 8. p. 794
7 Jung. Selected Letters of C.G. Jung: 1909-1961. Pantheon Legacy Library. Bollingen Series. Princeton University Press1984. Vii.
8 Jung. Alchemical Studies. C.W. Vol. 13 p. 335

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Through the Looking Glass

A Dream Traveler Explores Other Dimensions

By LINDA H. MASTRANGELO

The simplest way to visualize a Kerr wormhole is to think of Alice’s looking glass. Anyone walking through the looking glass would be transported instantly into Wonderland, a world where animals talked in riddles and common sense wasn’t so common.
—Michio Kaku from Blackholes, Wormholes and the Tenth Dimension

I consider myself a prolific dreamer. In other words, I remember my dreams quite frequently and have been keeping an archive of these dreams for over 30 years. I also like to call myself an oneironaut or “dream traveler,” for in many instances I have journeyed to different worlds or realms. What I have discovered over time was a distinct pattern in these journeys, namely in the form of a portal or gateway that would appear in the pre-lucid state. Not unlike Alice walking through her looking glass, moving through these portals brought me to strange and fantastic worlds.

My hope for this deep sharing is to connect with other dreamers who have had similar experiences and create an open dialogue to expand awareness of the phenomena. William Blake writes, “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” Perhaps this will not only spark the imagination, but through the gifts of the dreamtime, allow us to soar to greater heights of consciousness and understanding.

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Childhood in the Dreamtime

My rich dream life began in childhood where the veil between the different worlds was quite thin. I wasn’t aware at the time what was happening to me and sadly did not have context or an adult or community to guide me. I spent most of my childhood in the hypnagogic or borderland state: The stage of sleep between waking and sleeping.

These experiences were amplified when I was eight years old when my family moved into a one-hundred-year-old house. Though I had my own room for the first time, I soon learned I was not alone. Often at night, I would see, hear or feel energies or presences in the room. Other times I experienced a type of “stretching” as if my body was elongating or I was trying to come out of my body like in an Out of Body Experience (OBE).

It wasn’t until many years later would I understand what these experiences were or what it meant to be an oneironaut or “dream traveler”.

Two Discoveries

A turning point occurred while practicing lucid dreaming over time.

Coined by Jean d’Hervey de Saint-Denys who spoke of “reves lucides” or “lucid dreams” in his 1867 book Les Reves Et Les Moyens De Les Diriger (Dreams and How to Guide Them) is realizing you are dreaming while in a dream state or as the American Psychological Association (APA) defines it, is “a dream in which the sleeper is aware that he or she is dreaming and may be able to influence the progress of the dream narrative.”

I discovered that right before I became lucid a portal or “opening” would appear in my periphery, usually to the right of me. I also realized I could travel between worlds by using these portals, wormholes and membranes. I visited the Underworld, flew into the eeriness of the Void and played in the Imaginal Realm: the place of my imagination. I met friends from parallel universes and visited relatives from the “other side.” What was even more exciting was discovering the parallels between quantum physics and indigenous science. These discoveries would not have been possible if it wasn’t for the dreaming community I had immersed myself in, namely the International Association for the Study of Dreams and the graduate dream studies program at John F. Kennedy University.

The other turning point was more personal. It was learning about the mystical vocation of my great aunt, Zia Carmela who was a healer in her village of Accadia in the region of Apulia, Italy. The townspeople would come to discuss their dreams and she in turn would give practical and spiritual advice. I was flabbergasted. Yet it was so right. The trajectory of my life finally made sense to me. No one in my family talked about the ancestors, let alone dreams, before and I finally had the validation I needed to continue my work.

Dream Travel, Indigenous Ancestry and Quantum Physics

Other discoveries happened during this time. While researching the World Tree of my own indigenous ancestors, I was immediately struck by the parallels between experiences in my own nightly journeys and those of Odin and the nine realms or dreamgates of Yggdrasil: the central image of the Germanic-Nordic Religion World Tree or Axis Mundi. The shamans of this period ascend this tree, which contains nine worlds, to find esoteric knowledge in order to heal the community. Odin, who is the god of shamans, poets and warriors, was said to have hung on this tree for nine days as self-sacrifice in order to obtain this secret knowledge and ultimately descend the tree to receive the runes. He had the power to travel to these different worlds and have conversations with the beings that resided there, whether they be gods and goddesses, giants, dwarves, elves or humans.

If you look at other cosmologies and spiritual traditions across time you will notice the same common symbol: A World Tree containing gateways or realms. In Kabbalah, it’s the Sephiroth and ten spheres; in Buddhism it’s the Bo-Tree and the ten realms; Bahá’í Hindus use an inverted tree to explain godly processes; in Christianity, it’s the Tree of Life; and there’s also the Ceiba Tree of the Maya. And wasn’t “the music of the spheres” or ten gateways as studied by Pythagoras and his mystery school the forerunner of what we call String Theory today?

Oneironauts of the Past

Another validating discovery was that I wasn’t alone. There were other oneironauts, like 18th century scientist, philosopher and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, who developed his own lucid dreaming methods and, like Dante, regularly voyaged to heaven and hell, communicating with beings  that resided there. Rudolf Steiner advised that the best time for communicating with the dead was in the period between waking and sleep. Twentieth century Russian journalist and philosopher P.D. Ouspensky made the remarkable claim that we have dreams continuously, in both sleep and waking states. This was later proven to be true through scientific research.

What scientists are now proving mathematically regarding the ways that matter can move through space and time, indigenous peoples have been experiencing for thousands of years.

The connections between quantum physics, indigenous science and lucid dreaming also affirmed my belief that it is the Oneironaut working in conjunction with the Physicist that will open up new realms of possibilities.

William Blake writes, “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.”

THE PORTALS

Falling Through Darkness: Wormhole

My first successful lucid dream journey happened by entering a wormhole type portal. In this experience right before lucidity, I had strong emotions in the dream. I was laughing really hard and somehow that jogged my memory to become lucid. Here is the exact dream entry as it was written from my dream journal:

The space was a large shop run by four men who were selling strange objects (not sure what). It was my first day and I could sense this was going to be a fun job. The men were nerdy, “techie” and creative types and I was the only woman. I considered my age—was I too old for this job? I wondered if I was regressing especially when I noted the immature behavior of these guys. But I had deep affection for them and I was having the time of my life. Really good feelings here. At one point one of the men jumps on top of the other sending us all on the floor with me at the bottom of the pile and we fly backwards about twenty feet! They are too busy fighting and they don’t notice me until they hear me laughing. I am laughing really hard and wonder if they think I’m crying.

I suddenly remember to be lucid and look to my right for a portal. Sure enough there it is! It is a window or opening of a tunnel and inside is an antique doll. As soon as I see it I am flying towards it and enter the space which is dark and misty. I am not really controlling where I am going because I incubated before the dream to be an observer—just see what happens. It feels like I am on a rollercoaster as I make a turn in the air and rush downwards into an abyss. At the bottom I see a surface of bubbling liquid below. It reminds me of those bubbling witches’ cauldrons you see in movies with smoke on the top. I get frightened and will myself to not go there so that my body is just hovering over it. I feel danger so I look up for the light and I see it behind layers as if the sun was behind sheets of mist or webbing. I fly towards it but then realize I shouldn’t go too far into it and tell myself, “Don’t go into the light!” and I wake up. I have to giggle because my only pathetic frame of reference and advice came from the Poltergeist movie. I awake from the experience feeling elated! Perhaps I have found a way to elicit lucidity!

I learned many things from this experience. One is that I didn’t set an intention as to where I wanted to go or what I wanted to accomplish and found myself in this strange, almost comically hellish space, without any context or guidance, like some modern-day Icarus. Looking back, I wondered why it never occurred to me to ask for help. In that place, instead of diving into the bubbling cauldron I hesitated with a bit of fear and doubt creeping in so that I was literally suspended over it. What if I got stuck in the Void forever?

This felt like the middle place of fire and ice in Yggdrasil called Ginnungagap, the abyss between the two realms.

Tunnel of “Stars” or “Points of Light”

This wasn’t the first time I was introduced to the power of the imagination. In fact, I was actually shown the “imaginal realm” itself in all its creative possibilities when I asked if my imagination was limited. I was then clearly given the answer in such a powerful and playful way which totally expanded and shifted my perception of what is possible. Here is an excerpt from my journal:

I was in between two states of consciousness, dream and waking, and found myself being presented with a third way. I was clearly not dreaming but lucid, feeling present in my body and acutely aware of my surroundings but still there was this third place, a tunnel I could travel into where the opening was moving star-like points of light. I decided to enter this place, it was so easy, and I soon realized it was the place of the imagination. Though this was my imagination the little self was anticipating the experience as if it was on a mysterious journey. The space was brilliant in color and I could choose whatever I wished, my imagination, in all its possibilities, was endless. I could shift scenes very easily too and I noticed that while I did this, these imaginal creations had not solidified yet. In fact moving through them was like moving through a gelatinous substance. I write this because at one point, as my consciousness shifted, there was a large, white furry leg belonging to a bird-like creature that stomped on the “ground” and made the formations splat like colorful gelatinous candy. This image was repeated over and over and it felt like I was in a factory of the imagination!

The lesson was that we can create anything we imagine, and it is so important to expand this awareness right here, right now… and with an obvious sense of humor!

Step Into This Space: Membranes and Parallel Universes

One of the more exciting discoveries was learning about parallel universes and M or string theory. I remember watching a science program on parallel universes with theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. He tells us, “The superstring theory can explain the mysterious quantum laws of sub-atomic physics by postulating that sub-atomic particles are really just resonances or vibrations of a tiny string. The universe is then a symphony of vibrating strings. An added bonus is that, as a string moves in time, it warps the fabric of space around it, producing black holes, wormholes, and other exotic solutions of Einstein’s equations. The simplest way to visualize a Kerr wormhole is to think of Alice’s looking glass. Anyone walking through the looking glass would be transported instantly into Wonderland, a world where animals talked in riddles and common sense wasn’t so common.”

When Dr. Kaku described membranes, vibrations and wormholes, I almost fell out of my seat. It was so validating. Though he was explaining it theoretically I was actually experiencing this phenomenon in the dreamtime.

In one lucid dream I literally passed through an opaquely white membrane substance and into lucidity. The environment looked like a regular park you would see here on earth but clearly the laws of physics were very different. I was in an open field surrounded by tall trees, almost like a runway, and I had the sudden urge to fly. I ran quickly down the path and then felt myself take off into the sky; a feeling of blissful accomplishment and wonder came over me as I looked down at the spectators below me.

A few months later, I had another “membrane” dream but this time it was a Wake-Initiated Lucid Dream where I went directly into lucidity and I could see people from behind that same milky membrane calling to me like old friends. But the more I thought about it, the more the substance solidified into a wall and I couldn’t break through any more. I could still hear them as I shifted right back into “waking state.”

To be lucid means to be fully awake in all areas of our lives, including relationship to ourselves, other people and the environment. By practicing lucid waking, I can therefore be more present in my waking life. The practice of lucid dreaming moves us outside of our comfort zones and opens us up to new possibilities, even new worlds. We can defy the laws of physics, heal ourselves and others, and solve problems both big and small.

Dimensions Coming into You

One of the most extraordinary lucid dreaming experiences happened when one of my creatures from another dimension broke through to “my waking world.” Here is an excerpt from my dream journal:

This morning after waking, I practiced the technique and I was suddenly in the midst of a dream about joining a group of people who wanted to promote consciousness. I had left for a moment with a friend to get some refreshments at a snack bar then looked up at the sky to the right. My whole perception changed. I knew I was dreaming but it was beyond that. It was a new state like my Imaginal Realm. I felt a burst of excitement as I waited expectantly to see what was about to emerge from behind a cloud. (Interestingly enough, I could feel my cat sleeping soundly next to me in the crook of my arm.) Suddenly, a black and white creature flew from behind the cloud and headed straight for me! It was like a creature from my art work as it had a moon face with smiling teeth and odd shaped bat like wings.

I was afraid to move because I didn’t want this experience to stop from too much excitement. As the creature headed towards me it ‘disappeared’ and I saw ‘nothing’ however I realized with awe it had manifested in my room! I knew it was there because I could hear it flying around my head, like the sound of a flying machine clicking its gears and cogs right against my ears. I could also hear an ‘air pump sound’ as if it was from a science fiction movie. What was even more startling was the reaction of my cat. She jumped up and I could feel her head moving right to left as if she was watching (and reacting to!) the flying creature dart about the bedroom. I lay paralyzed, afraid to move an inch as the thing circled the room.

After a few moments it ‘left’ and the noise died down. I opened my eyes and noticed the bottom half of my body was completely numb like a giant lump with no legs. It took really strong concentration to wiggle and feel my legs again. By that time, my cat went back to sleep and I was left in complete shock and wonder.

This particular experience reminded me of the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem, “What If You Slept:”

What if you slept…
and what if in your sleep you dreamed
and what if in your dream you went to heaven
and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
and what if when you awoke you had that flower in your hand ah, what then?

I can’t also help but recall the potent lines of Hermes Trismegistus from The Emerald Tablet, “As above, so below…” What I create can truly come to be. As I am a dreamer, artist and poet, this philosophy comes naturally to me. What I create in my mind I can put down on paper either with words or illustrations. I had never thought about this act of creation being linked to something magical or cosmic before, or that both my art and dreams come from the same source.

Practicing Lucid Waking

To be lucid means to be fully awake in all areas of our lives, including relationship to ourselves, other people and the environment. By practicing lucid waking, I can therefore be more present in my waking life. The practice of lucid dreaming moves us outside of our comfort zones and opens us up to new possibilities, even new worlds. We can defy the laws of physics, heal ourselves and others, and solve problems both big and small. It was the natural practice of our indigenous ancestors and I believe our gateway into the mysteries of life. What could be more vital, more exhilarating than that?

Is it real?

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact.
–William Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream

What lucid dreaming also teaches us is that the world is continually being created. We are beings, not these fixed, static roles. We can perform extraordinary acts of love and compassion. We have also been given the gift of the imagination to create worlds and expand consciousness. There have been many controversies regarding the importance of whether or not lucid dreaming is real, and that there are other worlds or life after death. The issue here is not what is real but what has been shared collectively; and even more importantly, what has been transformed by the experience.

Throughout my research what remains constant, regardless of what lens or belief system a person operates through, is that these dreams bring transformation in the form of courage, calm and even excitement in the face of the biggest mystery of them all, our own mortality. This tells me that we are much more than our small selves, and our imagination can surely lift us out of our narrow perceptions from who we think we are towards who we could be. Lucid dreaming then becomes an evolutionary movement: the catalyst that forms the new human.

RESOURCES

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., ed. (2000). The Tibetan Book of the Dead: Or The After-Death Experiences on the Bardo Plane, According to Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup’s English Rendering. Oxford: Oxford University Press (Original work published 1927).
Khan, C. H. (2001) Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans: A Brief History. Indianapolis, IN: Hacket Publishing Company.
LaBerge, S. (1980). Lucid Dreaming: An Exploratory Study of Consciousness During Sleep. Doctoral dissertation, Stanford University.
Metzner, R.(1994). The Well of Remembrance: Rediscovering the Earth Wisdom Myths of Northern Europe. Boston, MA and London England: Shambala Publications.
Steiner, R. (1928). Inner Nature of Man and Life Between Death and Rebirth. New York, NY: Anthrosophic Press.
Rinpoche. T. W. (1998). The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. New York: Snow Lion Publications.
Varela, F. (ed.) (1997). Sleeping, Dreaming, and Dying: An Exploration of Consciousness With the Dalai Lama. Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications.
Waggoner, R. (2008). Lucid dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self. Needham, MA: Moment Point Press, Inc.

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The Art of Dream Inquiry

Cultivating Seeds of Light

By MARY LANE POTTER

A dream is a letter from the Beloved,
written to you alone. Read it.

A dream is a gift from the Absolute Mystery,
fashioned for you only. Open it.

A dream is a seed of Light sown in your unique being.
Cultivate it so it bears fruit.

Not all mystics are granted visions. Very few can, like Ibn ‘Arabī, train the active power of the imagination to create manifestations of Reality on other planes of existence. Even fewer receive prophetic or “true” dreams, dreams inspired directly by God. But all travelers, all those journeying toward the One, dream. And “a dream is one-sixtieth part of prophecy,” say the ancient rabbis; “a pious dream is the forty-sixth part of prophecy,” says Salih Muslim. Though our dreams may not be “true” dreams, there is true knowing in our dreams and, with practice, we can discover the truth hidden there for us. Just as the practices of retreat, dhikr, meditation, contemplation, music, breathing, and visualization loosen the ties to ordinary consciousness, so too may the spiritual practice of dream inquiry. “A natural state of sleep is like a profound concentration, like deep meditation,” Hazrat Inayat Khan teaches, “and that is why everything that comes as a dream has a meaning.” (Healing, 213) Learning how to receive that meaning is part of the path of a Sufi, which is not to converse with fairies and spirits, see colors and visions, but “to connect with one’s deepest, inner self, as if one were blowing on one’s inner spark.” (Inner Life 91) The art of dream inquiry can help us blow on that spark.

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A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path; it was trampled on, and the birds ate it up. (Parable of the Sower, Luke 8:5) For a traveler, everything is pregnant with revelation. I was a hidden treasure that loved to be known and therefore I created the Universe as a means of knowing myself. (hadith qudsi) Why, then, do so many of us neglect or dismiss dreams? A cultural leaning toward a materialist view leads some to disregard dreams as random firings in the brain signifying nothing. Others assume dreams are simply projections of desires or eruptions from the unconscious. Still others consider dreams mere fantasies, that is, not real, and therefore misleading or distracting. And some regard dreaming with suspicion because of its association with being asleep, not being awake to the One.

A more welcoming approach to dreams suffuses Sufi tradition. For those who seek the One, dreams lead toward Reality, not away from it; they’re a gift to help guide us on our journey of awakening. This view is rooted in Ibn ‘Arabī’s teaching on the Oneness of Being, the multiple “imaginations” of Reality, the mundus Imaginal, and himma or creativity of the heart. For Ibn ‘Arabī’, the highest plane of existence is Reality itself, Absolute Mystery, Light—the Hidden, al-Bātin. All other planes—the world of angels and spirits, the world of souls and ideal forms, the mundus Imaginal or Imaginal world, and the sensory world—are relative existences, imaginations of Reality, shadows of this Light—the Manifest, al-Zāhir. “[Know] that you are an imagination, as is all that you regard as other than yourself an imagination. All [relative] existence is an imagination within an imagination, the only Reality being God.” (Bezels, 125) All that is manifest, including our life in the sensory world, is a dream within a dream.

Though these imaginations are not Reality itself, they contain theophanies, real presences of the One, that can be known through the creative power of the heart. “God created shadows… only as clues for you in knowing yourself and Him, that you might know who you are, your relationship with Him, and His with you.” (Bezels, 126) Like all planes of relative existence, the mundus Imaginal, the plane where spirits are materialized and matter spiritualized, the plane of visions and dreams, is a world of real presences that reveal Light. “The light of this luminous Wisdom extends over the plane of the Imagination, which is the first principle of revelation.” (Bezels 120). In this view, dreams are not fantasies or ego-driven desires. No less real than the sensory world, they too manifest Light. Though we may say it is nothing, Inayat Kahn teaches, “a dream is as real as life on the physical plane.” (Healing, 212)

Because these real presences occur in different forms, however, we have to learn how to interpret them, for what we perceive in one world differs from what we perceive in another world. In the mundus Imaginal, for example, we may see milk or a man. We must receive these not as we know them in the sensory world but according to their “true” form: milk as knowledge, a man as the angel Jabril, “the light of your Lord.” For those who know how to carry forms seen in dreams back to their true form, dreams reveal Light. (Bezels, 123)

We need not subscribe to Ibn ‘Arabī’s metaphysics or dream hermeneutics to appreciate his wisdom for our spiritual practice today: imaginations are central to the way we perceive Reality and ourselves; dream experiences are real; images must be interpreted wisely for them to yield their truth. Far from esoteric, this approach of welcoming dreams aligns with contemporary neuroscience and non-dualistic philosophy, with their exploration of body-mind continuity, feeling and image-making as vital to the emergence of consciousness, and meaning-making-by-combining-images as essential to human being. (See Antonio Damasio’s The Strange Order of Things and Mark Johnson’s The Meaning of the Body.) Recognizing how feeling and non-conscious thought enable us to make sense of the world supports embracing dreams as a way of knowing reality.

Listen, O dearly beloved!
I am the reality of the world, the center of the circumference.
I am the parts and the whole.
I am the will established between Heaven and Earth,
I have created perception in you only in order to be the object of my perception.

If you then perceive me, you perceive yourself.
But you cannot perceive me through yourself.
It is through my eyes that you see me and see yourself,
Through your eyes you cannot see me.
—Ibn ‘Arabī, Book of Theophanies (Corbin, 174)

Some [seed] fell on rocky ground, and when it came up, the plants withered because they had no moisture. (Luke 8:6) Everyone dreams, few of us remember our dreams. This is a loss, for remembering dreams can strengthen the twinned heart of spiritual life: remembering God and remembering our true being. The rabbis say it this way: “If one goes seven days without a dream, he is called evil.” (Berakhot, 55b) When one is not receptive to dreams, one is not open to the creative heart-knowing they invite, one is turning away from the One, the Knower who loves to be known though us. I’ve experienced this. Even when my meditation practice is nourishing, if weeks or months pass without remembering a dream, I feel bereft, as if not quite touching my deepest and widest self, a part of me still skimming surfaces, sleepwalking.

We can train ourselves to remember our dreams. Practices that have helped me include: no media before bed; writing the date in a dream journal and keeping the book open beside the bed; breathing in Ya Bātin and breathing out Ya Zāhir, or praying “Breath of the Merciful, may your seeds of light sown while I sleep take root in my heart and ripen in my being”; upon waking, keeping the eyes closed and not moving or talking; writing the dream down in detail, without editing it or questioning its worth; recording the feeling the dream left me with; giving thanks for the dream. Some suggest writing down a question and placing it under your pillow. Normally I don’t do this, because I avoid directing or limiting my dreaming. For me, dreams are a way of perceiving reality beyond ordinary consciousness, beyond our will and intellect; they’re not answers to questions my ego poses but divine invitations to inquiry into the being-I-am-becoming.

Many techniques for remembering dreams are available—from listening to music to taking Vitamin B6 to inhaling the scent of lavender or mugwort. Find ones that help you catch the seeds sown for you.

Dearly beloved!
I have called you so often and you have not heard me;
I have shown myself to you so often and you have
not seen me….
Why do you not see me? Why do you not hear me?
Why? Why? Why?
—Book of Theophanies (174)

Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up with it and choked the plants. (Luke 8:7) “A dream that is not interpreted is like a letter that is not read.” (Talmud, Berakhot, 55b) We don’t passively receive a truth revealed in dreams; it must be “discovered” by us. (Healing, 214) As the ancient rabbis say, based on the practice of Joseph, the Master of Dreams, dreams “follow the mouth,” the interpreter. The interpreter, however, must know how to discover the truth hidden in a dream, how to “pass from the form of what one sees to something beyond it.” (Bezels, 99)

Interpreting dreams literally, in terms of the sensory world, prevents the unfolding of their deeper truth. Ibn ‘Arabī gives the example of a man who dreamed of drinking milk, woke up, drank a glass of milk, and vomited. If the dreamer had carried the image of milk back to its true form, he would have seen the light shining in the shadow: that he needed to imbibe knowledge. Ibn ‘Arabī even faults Joseph, whom he lauds as a prophet of the Wisdom of Light, for misinterpreting his boyhood dream of the sun, moon, and stars bowing down to him in this way: by reading his brothers’ and father’s submission to him in Egypt years later as the real or sensible meaning of his dream. Ibn ‘Arabī doesn’t offer a “true” interpretation of Joseph’s dream; he simply suggests it has to do with something beyond this life that Joseph had yet to wake up to. His false ego, perhaps, which he had to annihilate if he was ever to receive in love the brothers who abandoned him?

Consulting dream dictionaries can choke dreams too. Their cultural and historical assumptions often mislead, overwhelm, or confuse. For several years, snakes inhabited my dreams. In Jewish dream dictionaries, snakes symbolize deception; in Christian dictionaries, evil, malice; in Muslim dictionaries, enemies, evil, war, deceit, destruction; Native American, wisdom, rebirth, healing; Jungian, the wisdom of the collective unconscious; Freudian, sexuality. How to know which to pursue?

Dream dictionaries also stifle interpretation by speaking generally, not to individuals. Dreams, perhaps more than breathing, visualization, and other spiritual practices, arise from the uniqueness of our being-in-the-process-of becoming, including our body and personality. Even if two people dream the same dream, it must be interpreted differently. “Every individual has a separate language of his dream peculiar to his own nature,” Inayat Kahn teaches, so one must know who dreamed the dream and interpret it “according to his state of evolution, to his occupation, to his ambitions and desires, to his present, his past, and his future, and to his spiritual aspirations.” (Healing, 200). Ibn ‘Arabī lauds Joseph for interpreting the dream of Pharaoh’s baker, his steward, and the Pharaoh himself this way, according to each man’s unique being.

Dream dictionaries share another limitation: the entries are based on concepts, not feelings, and as neuroscientists like Damasio tell us, all images come with feelings associated with them. More than the generalized content of symbols, it is the specific feeling a dream leaves in its wake—relief, terror, disgust, anger, anxiety, frustration, joy, love, peace—that provides a more trustworthy way into its truth.

To discover the truth in my snake dreams, I had to know who I was: a mother living in rural South Carolina where rattlers, cottonmouths, and copperheads frequented our yard; a professor leaving her vocation; a Christian converting to Judaism; a woman confronting childhood abuse and struggling with depression. I had to sink into the feeling that colored the dreams: abject fear. And I had to be wary of any interpretation that did not serve the deepening of my unique being on its path toward the One.

Dearly beloved!
Let us go toward Union.
—Book of Theophanies (175)

Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up and yielded a crop, a hundred times more than was sown. (Luke 8:8) Discovering a truth hidden in dreams depends not on analysis but on the art of inquiry. When we analyze something, the anthropologist Tim Ingold explains, we treat it as an object, a text to decode or translate; we think about dream images, for example, we think after them, looking back to see what meaning they contained. When we inquire into a dream, we think with dream images, looking to the future to see what truth can unfold in our lives. Indigenous hunters, who often dream about the animals they hunt, exemplify the art of inquiry. “To dream like a hunter is to become the creatures you hunt and to see things in the ways they do. It is to open up to new possibilities of being, not to seek closure.” (Making, 11) In the dream the hunter perceives the world in a different way than in ordinary consciousness, and he brings that knowing back to waking life.

Dreams offer us a different way of perceiving reality from the way we ordinarily perceive it. Past, present, and future are compressed, the logic of our daily world is suspended, and we experience reality with different senses, in a different medium, from a different point of view—an animal or tree, the sky or sea. By thinking with a dream experience, we can discover what this different way of perceiving can show us for our lives, how it can guide us in becoming our true selves. Like prophecy, which does not foresee the future but sees the present deeply in order to uncover new possibilities, the art of dream inquiry does not foretell what will or must happen in our lives but leads us deeper into the being we are in the process of becoming, closer to the One.

How can we think with our dreams instead of about them? Each of us must find our own way to heart-think our dreams so they unfold their meaning and ripen in our lives. Several practices have helped me. Each requires you to set aside your will and intellect to give your creative heart over to the dream: you do not work on the dream, to understand it or change it, but allow the dream to work on you. By loosening the grip of the ego and encouraging patient receptivity, these practices help ensure that the waking mind’s eagerness to make sense out of things doesn’t foreclose the dream’s deeper truth. A simple practice is to sit with the feeling a dream left you with. Place that feeling in your heart in meditation and follow where it leads. Another is to place the scene of a dream or an image from it before you in meditation and watch what arises. This is similar to Pir Vilayat’s visualization exercises in Awakening, but using the images your deep self has offered instead of one given to you by a murshid. “Like a doorway opening to that which transpires behind what appears,” he teaches, “an image can lead the psyche into the landscape of the soul.” (59-60) This applies to dream images as well.

Another practice is active imagination, as described by Robert Johnson in Inner Work. Put yourself in a semi-trance, re-enter the dream, look around, and wait until something happens—a character approaches you or talks to you, you find yourself doing or saying something—and then participate in what unfolds, without controlling it. Using this practice on my snake dreams and many others has shown me its creative, healing, and integrating spiritual power. It also taught me experientially the truth of Ibn ‘Arabī’s real presences in the mundus Imaginal. I experienced each active imagination as real, not a movie I was watching in my head but a world I experienced in my body and psyche. I shook with fear, my heart pounded, I sobbed convulsively, I laughed out loud, my skin shivered, I winced in pain, my whole being opened into a smile. There was no doubting the reality of these experiences and their healing effects in my body, psyche, and spirit.

Because I believe most dreams have the potential to yield fruit, I don’t find taxonomies that distinguish true, false, and insignificant dreams helpful. I’m more interested in the variety of ways dream inquiry can guide our being-in-the-process-of-becoming—warning, correcting, rebuking, healing, commanding, summoning, comforting, reassuring, beckoning, creating a way out of no way—and the varying tempos that inquiry can take.

A dream is “the unripe fruit of prophecy,” say the rabbis. (Midrash Rabbah) Some dreams ripen fast. Healing and comforting dreams often do. As a young adult I dreamed I was stuck in a closet, two hand-crocheted dresses hanging before me. One was my size but aqua, my mother’s favorite color. The other was red, my favorite color, but sized for a small child. I stood paralyzed, unable to choose. Then I looked up and saw a purple crocheted bag, flexible and ample enough to hold all that I needed. I woke up healed. In my fifties, in a time of great upheaval, I dreamed of navigating a long, narrow, twisting, rapids-strewn river in a canoe, working hard to survive each new danger. Suddenly I was at the end of the journey, high above a canyon, by a waterfall, looking back at the entire sweep of the river, overwhelmed by the beauty of it of it all. I woke up in peace. “Spiritual progress is the changing of the point of view,” says Inayat Khan. (Inner Life, 133) In shifting my perspective, these dreams transformed my life.

Some dreams ripen over years or decades. Dreams I had in my twenties about concentration camps and Jewish refugees sailing on a tiny raft to Israel; dreams in my thirties about Jesus drowning in a dungeon prison and Joan of Arc fighting inside a dark cathedral, laying down her sword, and walking outside into the sunshine; and dreams in my fifties about Khidr dancing wildly—all unfolded slowly to guide me on my path.

Dream inquiry is a dangerous art. To practice it wisely requires patience and humility. It takes years of welcoming and working with our dreams to become familiar with their peculiar language for us. And our interpretation deepens and widens as our hearts do. The boy Joseph who interpreted his dream of the sun, moon, and stars bowing down to him was not the mature, awakened Joseph who was able to set himself aside to interpret the dreams of others. Also, as with every practice, the art of dream inquiry is not immune to the tricks of the ego, that enthralling illusion. Recently, while dreaming, I heard, “Be ready for the call.” For months I believed this promised the arrival of a career opportunity, and I taped the words over my desk to give me hope. After a shocking early morning phone call informing me of my younger sister’s untimely death, I believed the dream’s true meaning had been revealed. Now I hear these words differently; they’re a knock on the door of my heart: Wake up!

The art of dream inquiry may be the most mysterious art of all, but if we nurture our creative heart and dare this spiritual practice, it can guide us on our journey of awakening.

To sleep, perchance to dream; to dream, perchance to wake.

NOTES
1  Joel Covitz, Visions of the Night: A Study of Jewish Dream Interpretation. Boston: Shambala, 1990.
2  Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone; Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabī. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.
3  Ibn ‘Arabī, The Bezels of Wisdom. Tr. R.W. J. Austin. New York: Paulist Press,  1980.
4 Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archeology, Art and Architecture. New York, 2013.
5 Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth. HarperSanFrancisco, l986.
6 Hazrat Inayat Khan, Healing; Mental Purification; The Mind World. Surry: Servire, 1978.
7 The Inner Life. Boston: Shambala, 1997.
8 Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, Awakening: A Sufi Experience. New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1999.

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