Dream Lenses to Work with Dreams
Excerpted from Dream Tending by Stephen Aizenstat and Dream Gates by Robert Moss
The quality of your dreams is reflective of the amount of stillness and silence and space you have in your daily life. Dreaming reveals the soul voice.
Dreams live in a multi-dimensional psyche.
Dreams Are Alive. Respond as if you are in relationship to images in a dream.
All Things Are Dreaming. Recognize that everything has consciousness and thus dreams.
Dreams Are Now. Speak dreams only as if they were happening in the present moment.
Three Processes to Enliven and Engage Dream Images
1) Association (Signs) The Personal.
Look at the image in the context of the immediacy of daily life.
Look at developmental history.
Allow the dream to point to a context in daily life, with a possible similarity in
characters, setting, feeling/mood or action.
How is this similar to my present or recent experience in life?
What are the differences/similarities of the dream characters to my daily life?
2) Amplification: (Symbols) The Archetypal. The Collective Unconscious.
Look for the most significant and seemingly most insignificant images in the dream for symbolic content.
3) Animation: (Essential Nature) The Dreamtime. The World Unconscious.
To animate the image, answer the questions:
l) Who is visiting now? 2) What is happening here? (lots of levels)
Simplify to the essential nature, the archetypal aspect.
Allow the image to be alive and present. Be in relationship to it. Particularize the details to reveal their essential nature. Allow the image to be a living entity that can change. Since thoughts create reality, that ability to change offers healing.
(Move away from the critical mind with the “programmed in” analytical questions such as: What does this mean? Why did this happen? )
Responding to Someone’s Dreams: If it were my dream...
Accessing the Inner “Healer”
The Body is Dreaming.
Decoding the Body’s Dream:
Dreams will offer both information about the body’s needs or dysfunctions and often a way to bring balance once again within the same dream image.
Naming: Getting the essential quality out of the image. Allow the intelligence of the image to be activated.
Ask who is visiting now? What is happening here?
Ask who the healing deity is in your dream. (That can be an image, a symbol, a person.)
Offering: What is being asked now by the dream image itself? What gift or offering is being asked to be enacted in a healing process? (Often this is a vital, nourishing substance that offers renewal and vitality to the image. It is often suggested within the dream image.)
Ceremony: The hint of a healing ceremony that can heal the image of dysfunction is often proffered within the dream. The ceremony needs to include repetition, sustained attention. The form is often indicated within the dream.
Images are very powerful. Changing the image, changes external reality!
Dream Gestation. Incubation.
Ask a question before going to sleep.
On the first night. How can we support planetary unifying synthesis?
Ask for a lucid dream. When you meet someone in the dream “I am here. Are you?
What do you DO to Honor the dream?
Make something tangible from your dreams, a song, poem, art, dance etc.
Make a dream map or storyboard.
Dialog with one of the dream figures.
Step into one of the images or symbols and tell the dream from that perspective.
Tell the dream like you would be telling a delegation form outer space.
Compact the dream into one sentence, one image, one title, one bumper sticker.
