Have You Ever Shared a Dream?
The Gift of Our Dreams
Some dreams are given, shared by a friend or lover over coffee, or in the tangled sheets of morning, sleep crystals still hanging from our eyes. And what a gift. To receive the mysterious images of a dream. When a dream is spoken not for the sake of analyzing, interpreting, or “figuring it out” but shared as story–in the intimate communion of two souls–there is a certain magic, a grace.
Have you felt it? In a moment temporarily transported to a world of living images.
The bloody rivers, the whale rising up to look you in the eyes, the underground hovel, the day you married yourself, the forest’s moss, the falling planes, the white eagle, the old man on the rock, the procession, the spiraling building, the floods, the fire balls, the erupting volcanoes, the big black cat, the bear, the snake.
These are just some of the images I have received that continue to stay with me. Images that rise up in my psyche and stay awhile, like a friend, a lover or a great teacher. Images that open consciousness to the mystery that we are. Images that offer healing, that point me to an important lesson, that accompany me as I go through my day and guide me on my spiritual path.
Have you received images, either in your own dreams or the dreams that were shared with you?
Do you sense that these images or words or dreams are alive? Do they visit you again later, in the privacy of your own heart? Do you ponder them? Let them in? Allowing them to live on in your life?
For me, receiving a dream is a sacred act. The moment we start talking dream, we invite new dimensions into our relating. We invite creativity and imagination, we invite perhaps what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious. We part the veils of privacy and social normalcy and share the broken, forgotten, neglected–the empowered, ferocious, courageous, the utterly miraculous. For dreams speak in image, in symbol–they communicate story and narrative through the unconventional.
Community Dreaming
When we share in a dream, we are connecting beyond our ordinary means of communication. We are exposing something irrational and incomplete. We are speaking in the language of mystery and magic, the place of pure possibility and play.
This is what I love about dream-work. In one of the dream classes I led with Jogen Sensei, a fellow dream-enthusiast shared that one of his beliefs about sharing dreams together is that it creates culture. He distinguished between living in a society and a culture.
He spoke of something that seemed to resonate in the whole room. Something we all knew intuitively. Something I feel determined to recover. And perhaps we all do, which is why we attempt to give voice to dreams (even if it is only occasionally to a friend or lover.) The desire to share your dreams, reveals a desire to share in the mysterious emergence of life.
Over the last year I have been hosting a monthly dream group called DreamSky Dreaming Community. Each month we create space to share an image from one of our night-time dreams, and then we work on one of the participants' dreams together as a community. In this space, we receive dream images that open the dreaming. And then we get to dream into someone else’s dream, to dream the dream on as if it were our own dream, or perhaps as if it was the community's dream, or the earth’s dream, or the dream of the cosmos.
Who’s Dreaming This Dream?
The question of whose dream is this? Is a profound spiritual question. One I like to keep alive in my own ponderings. The question itself is spiritual in nature. It opens the adjacent questions, where do dreams come from? What is Mind/consciousness/awareness? What is shared / what is personal? Who am I? What is life / death? Where does anything come from?
Who is dreaming THIS dream?
With any question that is spiritual in nature, the question gets to be engaged on all levels of our being, especially the level of direct experience. We can limit our experience by the value we place on things. If we assume dreams are products of the brain, then we can easily accept that dreams are for us alone, that our dreams are ours, since they happen in the privacy of our mind.
To let a question be spiritual in nature, mystery and magic are allowed to sit at the table.
In the Buddhist tradition, thoughts are regarded as another sense. As with all of the other senses, there is a quality of receptivity to our experience of thoughts, images and dreams (whether they are dreams of the night or dreams of the day). One experience people begin to have when they meditate, is an experience of not being identified with the thought-stream. Many of our thoughts occur without us willing them to happen. They simply arise, we have a tendency to invest in them, believe them, cherish them, hate them. But they simply arise, just as these words arise, and the sounds that you are hearing, and the objects, people, light in whatever space you are in right now.
Marie-Louis Van Franz says “a dream comes from the same source as a tree or a wild pig; from Nature itself.”
James Hilman invites that perhaps the images of the dream are entering our consciousness for a reason. Perhaps they have something to offer us, our families, our loved ones or the world.
Does the Earth Dream?
When I tell people that I do dream work, they often want to share a dream with me.
The conversation goes something like. “Oh, I had the (craziest, weirdest, most awful..) dream the other day. Can I tell you?”
Many people in this space have recently shared dreams of an apocalyptic nature–floods, fires, volcanoes erupting. While to the dreamer this may make them anxious, the dreams I receive often have many healing images tucked within the destructive theme of the dream.
We don’t need a dream interpreter to tell us that the earth is heading into a crisis point that is likely to change the way that we live on this planet together. And yet, we may need these dreams and the healing images they offer as medicine offered from the collective psyche, from nature, from source or the great mystery, to help us as a species live into this time of great transition.
Sharing our Light
Dreams offer light in the darkness of night. A great revealing of the light within each moment of existence. The light that we are in the swirl of our becoming. This is where dharma meets dreams for me. Light revealing light to light. The beauty and grotesque, the fierce and the honest, the predictable and the extra-ordinary–share the same light. What is this light?
Part of my intention in attending to my dreams, studying dreams, receiving dreams and creating dream community is to provide space to allow the healing images and messages within our dreams to be witnessed, nurtured and shared. If you are curious to learn more, please reach out amy.kisei@gmail.com, or join us for a DreamSky Community Dreaming event. Please stay posted as I intend to continue to offer courses and workshops on Dreamwork and Spiritual Liberation and Embodying the Healing Images of the Night.
I also make art and poetry from dreams as a way of embodying the living images they share. If you would like a poem written from one of your dreams or would simply like to share a dream with me I am happy to receive them. I ask for a donation for the poem $25 - $50. Sharing dreams is always free!
Looking forward to dreaming with you!
