I don’t dream a lot when sleeping. Most nights my brain does a garbage dump of fragments and disorienting images. Some of you might think this is odd coming from some one who has been a dream worker for most if my life. The training over many years developed discernment and a deeper understanding of how the brain works, it’s impulses and chemistry. From the endless documentation of moon cycles, diet, seasons, emotional navigation, menstrual cycles, sugar/caffeine intake, etc…. a picture emerges of what goes on up the in my cranium. Most dreams are just the images formed by chemistry as it passes through the body. It’s not glamorous. It’s not insightful unless it disturbs you and you reflect and take actions to change your diet, get sober, or any other behavior change.
This is why I tell my students to keep a dream journal. You have to unravel the mystery of your body and mind. This comes from the first question in spiritual journey: Who am I?
What drives and motives the brain into action? The input from the senses, what nutrients enter the body, emotions, behaviors, addictions and reactions that unfold because you inhabit a body. These folds of fat and neural activity are constantly being stimulated and adjusted to the body’s interfacing with the environment it navigates.
Learning to read your dreaming takes time and there isn’t a certificate at the the end. You just know how you work body and mind better. Yet, through this knowledge into dreams and dreaming there is a door way into other worlds…. Time bending…. Interesting things happen.
When I do have a dream of significance I know based on my understanding of my process that it is worthy of furthering study and documentation. For me these dreams are lucid. I am alive in them, fully in my senses and I navigate them as if I were awake. The imagery is rich in ancestral, archetypal content and symbolism. To decipher these dreams I spent years writing down repeating people, places and things and then mapping that against what I ate, moon cycles, menstrual cycles, location, emotional state, interactions, shifts in relationships, environmental factors, political dynamics, general health, etc…. and over time I created for my use a glossary of a dream language that my mind works in.
I share all this because you can’t understand how to work in the dreamtime unless you have learned the machinery that creates the dreams. This is why it so important to know the difference in types of dreaming, what stimulates the dreams and how your body and mind work together in order to produce dreaming that is effective in your life. Be that a Shaman, artist, engineer, scientist, healer, etc….
Shaman @ Large 