Active Dreaming. Robert Moss A.
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dream adventures I may have shared with other people but had not remembered. I found an immense archive of shared dreams involving each of these people. One archive was as large as a Gothic cathedral, with shelves rising to the high ceiling many stories above. I watched several dream movies in each location. They took me deeply and vividly into scenes of other lives and other times — of leopard people in Africa, of Celtic voyagers in a coracle on a cold northern sea, of a turning castle in a high desert landscape where everything was the color of sand except for the pretty star-shaped flowers, blue and purple, on a terrace. The dream movies revealed a hidden order of connection in all these relationships that transcended our present lives.
On yet another day, when I felt impelled to go searching for lost dreams, I was drawn to a building that looked like an old-fashioned post office. It resembled the post office in the Rust Belt city of Troy, New York, where I once lived. When I arrived in front of it, in my conscious dream, the sky turned dark. I mounted the high steps and walked past the mailboxes toward the counters. Most of the steel shutters were down and locked for the night, but one was still half-open. Behind it, I saw letters spilling from pigeonholes and heaps of giant mailbags and packages. A small black woman in a blue uniform hurried to the desk and handed me a letter. I was moved to tears when I opened it and found a message from a beloved family member, long deceased.
When I turned to thank the postal clerk, I realized that I knew her. I had glimpsed her, in half-forgotten dreams, slipping mail through a letter drop in the door of my house, a letter drop that is not in the physical door. She strongly resembles a figure from history I was called to study by dreams I did remember — Harriet Tubman, a world-class dreamer who used her visions as maps to guide escaping slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad before the American Civil War.
I suspect there are back rooms in my dream post office where there is more to discover. Maybe one of them is like the cabinet noir in the old French post offices, where mail judged suspect by the authorities was held for inspection and often was never delivered to the addressee.
If you are missing your dreams (and your dreams are missing you), try taking a little quiet time, when you won’t be disturbed, and announce this as your intention: “I would like to go to a place where I can find my lost dreams.”
Maybe this will take you to a movie theater, a video store, or a post office, or another place entirely, constructed from your own life memories and suited to your imagination. Whatever form it takes, you will be entering the Office of Lost and Found Dreams.
Talking and Walking Our Dreams
You are never given a dream without also being given the powerto make it true. You may have to work for it, however.
— RICHARD BACH
Unless we do something with our dreams, we will not dream well. This is indigenous wisdom, understood by all of our ancestors when they lived in cultures that valued dreams and the dreamer. As my friends of the Six Nations tell it, soul speaks to us in dreams, showing us what it desires. If we do not take action to honor such dreams, soul becomes disgusted with us and withdraws its energy and vitality from our lives.
Dreaming is making a comeback in our modern world. Dream groups are sprouting up everywhere, to the point where the New York Times has dubbed them “the new book clubs.”4 Hardheads in the media are slowly opening to the discussion of dreams as something more than random neuronal firing in the brain or Freudian smutty jokes.
But there is a simple and essential principle that we must follow if we are to get good at dreaming again and allow our dreams to be good to us. Dreams require action — action to embody their energy and guidance and to bring it into our everyday lives and the lives of those around us. My Active Dreaming approach, which now guides dream groups and individual dreamers all over the world, upholds the principle that every dreamwork practice must result in an action plan. We are not content with some nebulous wishy-washy statement of general intention or spiritual correctness, such as “I’ll meditate more.” We want specific, practical action of the kind that both entertains the soul and sustains the body.
Of course, dreams can be mysterious and hard to relate to the issues of everyday life. In one of his seminars on dreams from childhood, Jung remarked that dreams “fall like nuts from the tree of life, and yet they are so hard to crack.”5 So the first action we may need to take is to find the right kind of nutcracker.
We don’t have to seek this alone. Once we learn to share our dreams in the right way with a partner or a group, we have an excellent recourse both for understanding our dreams and for determining the right action to honor them.
Lightning Dreamwork is an original and powerful process that I developed after observing that previous methods of dream sharing and dream analysis just weren’t enough fun and were short on action.
One of the great contributions of the American dreamwork movement has been to insist that dreams belong to the dreamers. As Henry Reed, a PhD in psychology and one of the founders of the movement, likes to say, “Dreaming is too important to be left to psychologists.” Montague (“Monte”) Ullman, a clinical psychiatrist, made an enormous personal contribution when he declared that none of us have the right to tell another person what his or her dream means based on certification or presumed authority. In commenting on one another’s dreams, we should begin by saying, “If it were my dream,” making it clear that we are offering our personal associations and projections, not presuming to tell the dreamer the definitive meaning of his or her dream. The work and example of Henry Reed, Monte Ullman, Jeremy Taylor, and grassroots dreamwork circles all over the United States helped to return dreams to the dreamers, affirming that we don’t need to be doctors or shrinks to offer helpful comments on someone else’s dreams. “Perhaps the most significant development concerning dreams in the latter decades of the twentieth century is returning them to their rightful owner, the dreamer,” says Reed,6 and I agree.
But more was required. Dream sharing needs to be fast enough to suit our busy schedules and Western hurry-sickness, and so fun and so helpful that people will want to do it as often as possible. Every dreamwork process — whether five minutes by the office coffee machine or in a dedicated dream group or workshop — needs to become an energy event that delivers juice as well as information. We want to bring energy as well as content from the place of dreaming, and we want to get that energy moving in the room and traveling beyond the room at the end of a conversation or session.
Playing the Lightning Dreamwork Game
Building on the foundations laid by America’s dreamwork pioneers, I invented a simple, high-octane process for sharing dreams with a partner or a group that I dubbed Lightning Dreamwork because it is meant to be fast (it can be done in five minutes) and to focus energy, like a lightning strike.
It has four steps. Step 1 is to get the dreamer to tell her story as simply and clearly as possible, leaving out autobiography and explanations. Stories need titles, so the dreamer should be encouraged to come up with a title for her dream report. In this way, the dreamer is helped to claim the power of creating and telling stories, which is central to the art of conscious living. When we can tell our story in a way that others can hear and receive, we have acquired real power that can be applied to any situation, from ending a family drama to winning a new job or a book contract.
In step 2, the person who is hearing the dream asks a few questions to get the bare minimum of facts required to place the dream in a context and see how it may apply to the rest of the dreamer’s life, past, present, and future. The first question is always about feelings. How you feel immediately after a dream is the first and best guide to the nature of the dream. The next questions involve running a reality check