Compass Dreamwork

Dreamwork as Spiritual Practice

Tag: dreamwork as spiritual practice (Page 6 of 8)

Dream Composting

June 10, 2014 /

compostIn my waking life, I am very happy in my work: I love teaching about dreams, facilitating dreamwork with individuals and groups, writing and exploring dreams in general… But a big part of my job is just the business of tracking a million details—and this can make me feel a bit crazy, even though I’m pretty good at it. I guess this sort of thing is part of most people’s lives these days: responding to e-mails, updating schedules and mailing lists, checking facts, creating new documents, planning and promoting events, social networking communication, troubleshooting website problems, etc. In the midst of the lists and reminders, it’s hard to find breathing space, and easy to lose touch with the meaning behind all this activity.

While all this is going on, I keep remembering why dreamwork is worthwhile—trying to let it help me stay grounded in my connection to the natural world, my desire to serve others, to learn and grow. Maybe I have another twenty years or so in this life, maybe less, maybe more—Am I experiencing this time fully, and giving myself to each moment? Where is this journey taking me, and how can I better participate in the unfolding process? I hope these are questions that we all take time to ask ourselves. We can also ask our dreams…

However, dreams are tricky—or perhaps “trickster-y.” They rarely give straightforward answers, and most dream-answers compound my questions with more questions. In fact, dreams respond to inquiries in the same way that waking life responds to dilemmas: through experiences that illustrate the nature and potential of the current situation. If my situation is complicated and entangled with my ideas about how things should be, then the experiences that come in response to my big questions will be similarly complicated and entangled. Continue reading

Seasonal Dreaming

June 3, 2014 /

columbine 01Do your dreams reflect the seasons? I’ve talked about some concepts shared by haiku and dreams in the last couple of posts [“Haiku Dreams,” and “Nature Dreams”], and one more of these shared concepts is the way that references to a specific season somehow increase the sense  of universality and timelessness in both haiku and dreams.

In haiku, the season is always included, either directly or indirectly—and this provides orientation in the natural world, as well as setting a tone and implying certain common associations understood between writer and reader. Is something similar going on in dreams?

Of course, not all dreams include seasonal references. Last night, for example, my dream fragments all seemed to be set indoors, and I can’t remember anything that would suggest what time of year it might have been. But when there are outdoor settings and a more continuous flow of dreaming, I can usually get at least some impression of a season. More often than not, it’s the same season that is currently happening around me in the waking world—but fairly frequently, there are interesting seasonal shifts or variations.

In early May, in Portland Oregon where I live, dogwoods and lilacs were in bloom, but my dream took place in New England (where I grew up) and reflected the season there at the tail end of winter:

I’m visiting my mother and look out the window to see that the trees are still bare and there’s still a lot of snow on the ground. I want to take a walk, but don’t know if I have my boots, or warm clothes with me. As I watch, it begins to rain, making the snow soggy. I open the door and take a deep breath of the fragrance of mud and melting snow—which evokes a strong sense of childhood springtime. I remember the relief of spring coming after a long, long winter.

This dream brought up associations with the grudging first glimpses of spring in my childhood—a time when I would dig down through the old snow in April just to see and touch some matted green grass. When spring finally did come, it came slowly, with many setbacks, and by the time the season hit its stride, summer was ready to take over. Continue reading

Housekeeping Dreams

May 6, 2014 /

housekeepingAfter a week of deep, lucid, lovely dreams—I’m now remembering only fragmentary, unpleasant and frustrating dreams. Such is the ebb and flow of dreamwork! I woke up this morning exasperated and grumpy after dreaming:

The Bed Is A Mess: I feel frazzled, anxious, impatient. There’s a charismatic yet slightly creepy spiritual leader coming to stay in my community, and I’m preparing a bed for him. According to his preference, the bed is just a bunch of blankets and old clothes strewn on the floor and covered in a contour sheet. I see that the sheets are stained, and decide to put all the bedding in the laundry and start fresh. Now, I search through a jumble of clothes and blankets, trying to find enough soft stuff to make a new bed. Others keep taking some of the best blankets for their own purposes. I put as much stuff as possible on the floor, trying to arrange it so that it will be soft, not too lumpy, and cover all the bare spots—but I can’t really see how this is going to work. How could a sheet fit over it all, and how could it possibly be comfortable? I know I’ve slept on such a bed myself, and it wasn’t too bad, but now my efforts seem ridiculous. After scrounging for more materials, I return to find that a dog has pooped on one of the bare spots. I am disgusted, and want someone else to clean it up.

Lately, I’ve been working with “bad” dreams—especially my own—and testing the belief (or hypothesis) that, as Jeremy Taylor says: “All dreams come in the service of health and wholeness” (Dream Work Tool Kit #1). Dreams like this one might strain my ability to see the wholesome qualities! (Dramatically frightening or disturbing nightmares are another story—to be considered at another time.)

I can certainly recognize that there’s metaphor and meaning in this unpleasant dream: I am encountering my own ambivalence about preparing a comfortable place for spiritual ideals that I’m not sure I trust—and also wrestling with my own need to control and “clean up” the world around me. Old clothes and blankets (maybe old roles and securities) aren’t coming together to make a new bed! And then there’s the poop (potentially, the fertilizer for that new “bed”—as in a garden bed?) that just seems like smelly waste material to me. I want to wash my hands of this whole project!

What is the use of such dreams? I already think I know what it’s trying to say, but it’s not particularly helpful. Yeah—I’m a mess—this is no big revelation. I notice that the dream-self (the “I” in the dream) feels worse and worse as the dream goes on. And it all ends on an ugly note. This seems to be telling me that there’s no hope! But, there have to be other ways of looking at it… Continue reading

Compass Dreamwork Essentials

April 22, 2014 /

Some of the blog posts I’ve been writing can get pretty abstract. In the past couple of weeks, quite a few new subscribers have joined the Compass Dreamwork blog, and as I reviewed what I was planning to post for this week, I realized that it didn’t give enough of a sense of what “dreamwork as spiritual practice” is really about. What is the starting point for this work?

It’s time to write about the essentials, to give you an idea of how I am approaching dreams in general, and how dreamwork can be a significant spiritual practice. You can find most of this basic stuff elsewhere on the website, but here I’m going to spell it out—so if you are just discovering Compass Dreamwork, this is a good place to start.

I don’t really think there are any “experts” on dreams. Just as in my work with death and dying, I’ve found that the more I explore and the deeper I go into the world of dreams, the more mysterious it becomes. But those of us who have explored dreams in depth for many years can come to have some familiarity with the territory, and can be good guides and companions for others who want to go further into dreamwork as a spiritual practice.

Here’s some of what I’ve learned, what I’ve come to trust, about dreams. I hope you will test this for yourself, and come to your own conclusions about what is useful to you and what is not.

  1. Dreams are experiences. Just like waking experiences, some dream experiences are pleasant and some are unpleasant. What matters, from a spiritual perspective, is not “controlling” the dreaming and waking experiences so that they are all pleasant (which is impossible), but becoming aware of how we respond and relate to those experiences. Our relationship to pleasant and unpleasant experiences ultimately determines their value for us—as all experiences offer the potential for learning, healing, and opening our hearts and minds
  2. The spiritual practice of relating to our dream experiences (or our waking experiences) can occur both as the experience is happening, and in retrospect as we remember and reflect on that experience. The dreams we don’t remember are still valid experiences that help shape who we are, just as the waking experiences we have long since forgotten still contribute to our lives. However, the dreaming and waking experiences we do remember offer more opportunities for reflection that can affect how we respond to future experiences, and can allow us to take a more active role in our own growth and development.
  3. Dreams offer some unique opportunities, different from the opportunities offered by waking experiences. Specifically, dreams show us that there are many ways of looking at ourselves, others, our world, and our sense of “reality.” In our waking lives, we can become stuck in self-reinforcing patterns that come to define us, limit our understanding, and determine our actions. For example, dreams call into question our absolute certainties about things like the nature of time and identity (in dreams, time can be fluid, and the experience of “self” and “other” can be malleable). Dreams can also allow us to explore moral and ethical questions without causing harm to ourselves or others—we can try out “forbidden” things and come to understand their metaphorical significance, without taking them literally.
  4. By becoming dream explorers, we enlarge our potential for coping with paradox, change and the unknown with courage and compassion. When we reach major turning points or crossroads in our lives, when one way of life falls apart (through illness, accident, crisis, death, loss of a relationship, job or home, etc.) and something new has not yet begun—we must cope with a major shift in our conception of ourselves and our lives. In dreams, we regularly have “threshold experiences” in a context that can help us to become more creative and flexible, so that we will be better able to cope with such “threshold experiences” when they inevitably occur in our waking lives. Three aspects of such experiences are especially common in dreams: paradox (contradictory truths can coexist), change (something must end in order for something new to begin), and encountering the unknown (instead of answers, we find an open-ended questioning process). In dreams, our expectations are turned upside down again and again. This is closer to the way things “really are” than the day-to-day routines we can come to take for granted.
  5. Some dream experiences can give us a glimpse—a direct experience rather than an abstract concept—of that which is ultimately meaningful and sacred. Such dreams have had a profound influence on the lives of individuals and communities, have guided spiritual and scientific breakthroughs, and may serve to remind us of our interdependence with the natural world. Dreams include our waking perspectives and draw upon our waking experiences, but they go beyond those perspectives and experiences as well. Dreams can include everything—what we think we know, and more than we could consciously imagine. So where do dreams come from? They are ours, and they are beyond us.

These are some of the essentials of my own dreamwork practice. They’ve emerged in the course of my explorations, and they guide me as I develop the programs and services of Compass Dreamwork. Of course, this is only the beginning! In other posts, I’ll write more about how these ideas (and others) apply to actually working with dreams. Please feel free to share your own learnings, or to raise questions that we can consider together.

Walking Around Wondering: The Wide-Angle Approach to Long, Detailed Dreams

April 8, 2014 /

beach in fog 01Although it’s common to remember dreams in a fairly fragmentary way—with more impressions than exact details, and with few extended storylines—most dreamers will periodically experience long, vivid dreams with elaborate plots, a full cast of characters, and nuanced, detailed scenery. Especially for young people, or those who are going through major life changes, such dreams may come in abundance.

When I’m working with long dreams (my own and others’) that contain a wealth of images, interactions, emotions and events, it is easy to get overwhelmed. So, I’ve been considering different ways of approaching such dreams. In the last post, I described the close focus approach (“Holographic Webs”) and today I’d like to talk about the wide angle approach.

In the wide angle approach, if someone is sharing a long, complex, richly detailed dream, I listen to the whole thing with an openness to the big story, as if I were dreaming it, and really experiencing it, myself. But I don’t expect to remember every exact detail. Maybe I try to organize the whole dream into some shape that seems natural: What is the beginning, the middle, the end? Does the dream have “acts” or “scenes” like a play—and is there a progression, a “plot development”? Continue reading

Holographic Webs: The Close-Focus Approach to Long, Detailed Dreams

April 1, 2014 /

web 03When I am fortunate enough to remember long, detailed, vivid dreams—or when I get to listen to others as they tell such dreams—it’s only natural to feel a bit overwhelmed at first.

Some of the people I work with individually are great dreamers, and each dream they bring contains so much rich imagery, such incredible events, such real and meaningful interactions and settings… How do I begin to respond to these wonderful dreams?

And if I go through a phase in my own life when the dreams are abundant, elaborate and profound… How do I find time even to write them down? Never mind trying to unfold their stories and significance! To explore the many and varied possible approaches to every aspect of these dreams, I would have to spend my entire waking life working with my dreaming life!

Obviously, when faced with such an “embarrassment of riches” (too much of a good thing), it’s not feasible, useful, or necessary to make each amazing dream into a PhD dissertation (or even a term paper). There are two ways that I tend to approach these dreams: First, there’s the close focus approach, and then there’s the wide angle approach. I’ll talk about the first approach here, and then follow up with the second in the next post.

The close focus approach begins with the holographic concept that any part of the dream will contain the whole of the dream in microcosm. In other words, when I dream an elaborate story containing multiple scenes, I can focus in on one scene, explore the themes, feelings and associations I find there—and then step back to see how those same themes, feelings and associations may be manifested in other ways in other scenes and in the arc of the dream story as a whole. Or, with an even closer focus, I can choose a single image or event in the dream, unfold some of its personal, cultural and archetypal meanings (see “Two Basic Dreamwork Skills”) and then reflect on the ways that other images and events may echo these meanings throughout the dream. Continue reading

“No Feeling Is Final”: Healing Beyond Feelings

March 11, 2014 /

feeling stone 01The title of this post is a quote from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke—“no feeling is final.” I’ve been writing and thinking a lot about the meaning of healing lately (see “Kites in the Wind: Defining a Healing Dream”), in preparation for a workshop on healing dreams that I’ll be offering soon. At the same time, I’ve been looking at the experience of healing in my own life, and have found that my personal sense of wholeness and well-being has a lot to do with my relationship to feelings, emotions, moods.

Emotions come and go—good or bad, they are the life energy of my experiences. However, their nature (like the nature of all energy) is to be perpetually moving, flowing, changing. In a healthy system, emotions flow through without getting stuck. Personally, I’ve found that when I become too identified with a feeling, it turns into a mood—a prolonged, limited and limiting state of being—and leaves me with few options.

If I think (and repeatedly reinforce the thought) that “I am angry,” then only the choices of an angry person are available to me. But if I just notice, “I feel anger,” then I am free to feel something else in a few moments. When “no feeling is final,” all the possibilities, pleasant or unpleasant, are at least open to change.

How does this apply to dreams? I just read a reference to studies by the dream researcher Calvin Hall, which revealed a surprising paradox: When counting the pleasant or unpleasant emotions in the dreams of his research subjects, he found that a significant majority of the emotions experienced in their dreams fell into the “negative” category (anxiety, frustration, sadness, etc.); yet, when the subjects were asked to rate dream experiences as a whole, most of them described their dreams as pleasant rather than unpleasant. Continue reading

Kites in the Wind: Defining a Healing Dream

March 4, 2014 /

Healing is a hard word to define! I don’t think of healing as fixing or curing or solving, but as a process of moving toward wholeness. Healing experiences can include maturing or ripening—coming to fullness and realizing potential—but they may also include dissolution and death, which are essential to completion and new birth.

So, when I talk about healing dreams (as I have been in the last couple of posts), I don’t usually focus on those exceptional dreams that actually seem to initiate a miraculous cure to an intractable illness, or a perfect solution to an impossible dilemma. Such dreams do occur, and entire cultural/religious practices (like the ancient healing rites at temples dedicated to Asclepius) have been devoted to the incubation of dreams that will bring health, wealth, and happiness to the desperate.

There are stories of people afflicted by poverty who dream of a buried treasure in the backyard, and then find the treasure just where the dream said it would be. There are stories of people with terminal illnesses dreaming of a healing herb that ultimately cures them, or experiencing a healing within the dream itself (an infusion of light, a cleansing, or a surgical intervention) and awakening disease-free. You can find books full of these stories—and there’s little doubt that dreams can bring about healing that involves a total reversal of fortunes, a “cure.”

However, if we are looking for special “healing” dreams to solve our problems, we are likely to be disappointed. I believe the reason some rare dreams actually “fix” things is that in those particular situations true healing happens to coincide with fixing, curing, solving. Most of the time, healing is a more subtle process, and healing dreams work their “miracles” by moving toward balance within the intricate network of other factors in a dreamer’s life experience. Continue reading

Can Healing Dreams Offer Practical Help?

February 25, 2014 /

plant 01In the last post (“The Healing Experience of the Dream Itself”), I emphasized that healing dreams aren’t usually specific in their helpfulness. I wrote: Dreams don’t generally bring healing by offering immediate solutions. If I incubate a dream with a particular problem in mind, asking for an answer, I believe I will always get a response, but usually it is a response that asks me to open myself to the whole experience, rather than giving me a specific key to unlocking the problem.

But, can dreams offer any practical help? By asking me to “open myself to the whole experience” of the problem I’m facing, can they help me to find useful tools or guidance within myself and within my situation? I believe that they can. And I believe that attending to the details of my dreams is one of the best ways to become aware of unexpected options and unconventional answers that might be available to me.

It is the very fact that the possibilities presented in dreams are unexpected and unconventional that makes them useful. If I am in need of healing, I have probably already considered, and tried, every possible solution within the grasp of my conscious mind. I’ve already reacted with strong emotions, and worked my way through various approaches to the problem. By the time I remember to go to my dreams for help, I’ve usually exhausted myself with the struggle, and I’m ready to try any crazy thing the dreams might suggest. Continue reading

The Healing Experience of the Dream Itself

February 18, 2014 /

One evening recently, a dear friend was coping with a crisis—and I could think of nothing else. My heart and mind were completely with the pain that she was going through, and the unresolved situation that she faced. There was nothing to be done to help, nothing to be done but wait and pray. As I waited to learn what the outcome might be, I couldn’t imagine working, writing, or even distracting myself with books or television. How could anything to do with dreams or dreamwork possibly make any difference here?

Nevertheless, since it was all I could do, I went to bed and to sleep—holding in mind the wish that all would be well. During the night, each time I woke, I did the Buddhist practice of Tonglen—which involves opening up (rather than shutting down) to the experience of suffering, letting myself feel this suffering on behalf of all those who suffer, breathing it in, and then sending love, relief and peace on the out-breath.

I breathed in the pain of helplessness that I was feeling along with my friend and so many beings all over the world who have suffered similar pain. I breathed out the warmth and safety of my own bed, the dearness of my loved ones, the easing of pain that comes from feeling connected and cared for—wishing that all beings could share this easing of pain. The Tonglen practice pervaded my sleep and my dreams.

In the morning, I felt rested and peaceful, even though my concern for my friend was still with me every moment. My dreams had been deep, and left a clear experiential memory of emotions, interactions, questions—though they seemed to have no direct relationship to the situation at hand. In my dreams, I wandered around schools, airports, familiar places—having sympathetic conversations with strangers. What did this have to do with my friend? Still, it was as if the dreaming (and the Tonglen) had healed my sense of being lost in my own uselessness.

The struggle to find solutions where there are no immediate solutions is both exhausting and isolating. But in the ordinary interactions of my dreams, I felt the simple connection of compassion and empathy—which is ultimately the only “solution” we really have to offer one another. In my dreams, I was just present with the feeling of being human and in relationship with others whose experiences I recognized and shared. This was enough. This was helpful.

Within a few more hours, I heard from my friend that the crisis had been resolved. The relief and love that I felt in response seemed to flow directly from the sense of connection in the dream experience. In fact, we are never “helpless” as long as we are connected in this way—our willingness to be fully present to one another’s lives (and our own) makes a tremendous difference in the way we all cope with crises.

Dreams don’t generally bring healing by offering immediate solutions. If I incubate a dream with a particular problem in mind, asking for an answer, I believe I will always get a response, but usually it is a response that asks me to open myself to the whole experience, rather than giving me a specific key to unlocking the problem. Continue reading

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Kerry Backstrom

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“In my view, dreams are much more accurately described as experiences—that is, conscious events one has personally encountered.... We live through our dreams as much as our waking lives.”
-Stephen LaBerge

“Perhaps, in the end, there are no dreams intrinsically more healing than those that demonstrate that our separation is an illusion; that we are part of a living web that extends beyond our own skin and skull.”
-Marc Ian Barasch

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