One of the greatest gifts of dreaming is that it puts us in touch with soul.
It takes us beyond the limited understanding of the everyday self and shows
us who we are, what our soul’s purpose is in this life experience and
what our heart truly yearns for. There is a word for this vital function of
dreams in the language of the Huron, a dreaming people of North America. The
word is ondinnonk, and it means a "secret wish of the soul", especially
as revealed in dreams. This expression takes us to the heart of healing. By
connecting with our dreams, and celebrating and acting on the information they
gift to us, we bring the energy and magic of soul into our daily lives. As we
allow our big dreams to take root in this world, we become whole and well, and
start living our deeper story. As we help others to honor and celebrate their
soul guidance, as revealed in dreams, we become healers and dreambringers.
Ancient dream healers understood that we are often out of touch, in our surface
minds, with our deepest truths and our heart’s desires. Not knowing who
we are, forgetting our soul’s purpose, we do terrible harm to ourselves
and others. Dreams invite us to get back on the right track, the soul’s
track. I learned about this many years ago when I asked for dream guidance in
support of a narrow, ego-driven agenda. I wanted inspiration for a commercial
potboiler, a thriller that would follow the formula of a successful previous
novel I had published. In my dream, I found myself in a banquet hall where a
lavish feast for hundreds of people was being prepared in my honor. But there
was a problem. In the dream restaurant, the master chef had walked out in disgust
because he was bored with my menu. The message, on waking, was clear. If I persisted
in repeating myself – in using my creative gifts for a limited purpose
– my deepest creative energy (the "master chef" of the dream)
would bow out; the soul and its magic would be missing. I abandoned a major
book project because that dream showed me it wasn’t "major"
in the ways that serve the soul.
Dreaming not only renews our understanding of the soul’s purpose; it
can literally bring the soul back home. From the shaman’s perspective,
soul loss is the root cause of much illness and affliction in our lives. We
suffer deep grief, heartbreak or abuse or trauma – and maybe then succumb
to negative habits and addictions – and a part of our vital soul energy
goes away. Chronic depression, lethargy, memory gaps, low resistance to illness
and emotional numbness are among the most frequent symptoms of soul loss.
Our dreams can tell us which parts of ourselves may be missing, and when it
is timely to bring them home. Recurring dreams in which we go back to a scene
from our earlier lives may indicate that a part of us has remained there. Dreams
in which we perceive a younger self as a separate individual may be nudging
us to recognize and recover a part of ourselves we lost at that age. Sometimes
we do not know who that beautiful child is – until we take a closer look.
There is a marvelous story in my book Dreamgates about what happened when a
woman went back into a dream of a beautiful five-year-old in a red coat, and
found herself fusing at the heart, in a blaze of light, with the part of herself
she had lost at age five through family trauma.
Unfortunately, a common effect of soul loss is dream loss. Indeed the absence
of dream recall is often a primary symptom of soul loss – as if the part
of the sufferer that knows how to dream and travel in deeper reality has gone
away, out of pain or disgust. It is fascinating and deeply rewarding to observe
what can happen when people who have forgotten how to dream start dreaming again.
This can amount to spontaneous soul recovery.
A middle-aged woman approached me for help. She told me, "I feel I have
lost the part of me that can give trust and know joy." As preparation for
our meeting, I asked her to start a dream journal, although she had told me
she had not remembered her dreams for many years. When she came to see me, she
had succeeded in capturing just one tiny fragment from a dream.
She remembered that she was standing over a table, looking at three large-size
"post-it" notes. Each had a typed message. But the ink had faded and
she could not read the messages.
Slowly and carefully, I helped her to relax and encouraged her to try to go
back inside her dream. Quite quickly, she found herself inside a room in the
house where she had lived with her ex-husband prior to their divorce, almost
twenty years before. Now she could read the typed messages. The first read in
bold capitals, "YOU CAN DO IT." They were all about living with heart,
and trusting life.
She realized that she had left her ability to love and to trust in that room
for nearly twenty years. I asked her what she needed to do. She told me, "I
need to bring my heart out of that room and put it back in my body." She
gathered up the messages and made the motion of bringing them into her heart.
As her hands crossed over the place of her heart, we both saw a sweet and gentle
light shine out from her heart center. She trembled, eyes shining, and told
me, "Something just came back. Something that was missing for twenty years."
In the most literal sense, dreaming can make us whole. It not only connects
us with lost or buried aspects of ourselves. It connects us with our larger
identity – our Higher Self – and our larger purpose.
Honoring the secret wishes of the soul, as involved in dreams, requires us
to learn some simple and powerful strategies that are central to my dream workshops:
Opening to dream guidance
Start a dream journal, if you are not keeping one already, and resolve to catch
your dreams and write up your dream reports, giving each dream a title. You’ll
find it very rewarding to dream with intention. Before going to sleep, write
down a question or issue on which you would like some guidance. This can be
specific ("Should I change my job?") or general and open-hearted ("I
open myself to the power of healing"). If you remember dreams from the
night, se how they might relate back to your intention.
Learn simple steps to clarify dream messages
The all-important keys are (a) trust your feelings (b) run a reality check and
(c) go back inside your dream to get more information. Your feelings, on first
waking up, are an instant and usually impeccable guide to the general quality
and urgency of the dream. Running a reality check means checking how elements
in the dream relate to your waking life and – especially – checking
to see whether the dream may be giving you a window into possible future events
in waking reality. We dream future events quite often, though few of us pay
attention and fewer still are alive to the interesting possibility that if you
can see the (possible) future you may be able to take action to change the future
for the better. (This is the theme of my recent book Dreaming True.) Finally,
the best way to understand the full meaning of a dream is to learn to go back
inside it, as you might step back into a room, take a good look around (while
fully alert and conscious), and maybe talk to someone in the scene or dream
the dream onward to healing or resolution.
Open a safe space to share and celebrate dreams with others
When we know that dreams show the wishes of the soul, we will surely want to
support each other in honoring this guidance. Start sharing dreams with a friend,
by email if necessary. Never presume to tell the other person what his or her
dreams mean. Start by encouraging your partner to tell the dream as simply and
clearly as possible, give it a title. Ask what the dreamer felt when she first
woke up. Ask her to run a reality check to see whether there are messages about
current situations in waking life, or possible future events. Then offer your
own thoughts and associations in a gentle way by always saying "if it were
my dream" rather than laying down the law. Finally, ask your partner what
she can now do – in a practical, positive way – to honor the dream
and act on its guidance. With a little practice, you’ll find safe ways
to bring dream-sharing to larger groups and start building a dream community.
An office that starts the day with dream-sharing is a vastly more lively and
creative space!
Always do something with your dreams!
Real dreamwork is about energy – about bringing vital energy from a deeper
reality into the daylight world. In my workshops, we turn our dreams into stories,
drawings and songs; we stage spontaneous dream theatre; and we agree on action
plans to work with the guidance of our dreams and the powers that speak to us
in dreams. Sharing a dream with another person is already a step towards action.
Writing yourself a personal motto inspired by a dream – a bumper sticker
– is a further step. Buy the red shoes, make the phone call, plant those
flowers, study the transformations of the Goddess or the Bear in myth and art,
as your dreams may guide you, and you are taking a longer step on the road of
soul, the only road to walk.
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