Читать книгу Active Dreaming - Robert Moss A. - Страница 23

You are never given a dream without also being given the powerto make it true. You may have to work for it, however.

— RICHARD BACH

Unless we do something with our dreams, we will not dream well. This is indigenous wisdom, understood by all of our ancestors when they lived in cultures that valued dreams and the dreamer. As my friends of the Six Nations tell it, soul speaks to us in dreams, showing us what it desires. If we do not take action to honor such dreams, soul becomes disgusted with us and withdraws its energy and vitality from our lives.

Dreaming is making a comeback in our modern world. Dream groups are sprouting up everywhere, to the point where the New York Times has dubbed them “the new book clubs.”⁴ Hardheads in the media are slowly opening to the discussion of dreams as something more than random neuronal firing in the brain or Freudian smutty jokes.

But there is a simple and essential principle that we must follow if we are to get good at dreaming again and allow our dreams to be good to us. Dreams require action — action to embody their energy and guidance and to bring it into our everyday lives and the lives of those around us. My Active Dreaming approach, which now guides dream groups and individual dreamers all over the world, upholds the principle that every dreamwork practice must result in an action plan. We are not content with some nebulous wishy-washy statement of general intention or spiritual correctness, such as “I’ll meditate more.” We want specific, practical action of the kind that both entertains the soul and sustains the body.

Of course, dreams can be mysterious and hard to relate to the issues of everyday life. In one of his seminars on dreams from childhood, Jung remarked that dreams “fall like nuts from the tree of life, and yet they are so hard to crack.”⁵ So the first action we may need to take is to find the right kind of nutcracker.

We don’t have to seek this alone. Once we learn to share our dreams in the right way with a partner or a group, we have an excellent recourse both for understanding our dreams and for determining the right action to honor them.

Lightning Dreamwork is an original and powerful process that I developed after observing that previous methods of dream sharing and dream analysis just weren’t enough fun and were short on action.

One of the great contributions of the American dreamwork movement has been to insist that dreams belong to the dreamers. As Henry Reed, a PhD in psychology and one of the founders of the movement, likes to say, “Dreaming is too important to be left to psychologists.” Montague (“Monte”) Ullman, a clinical psychiatrist, made an enormous personal contribution when he declared that none of us have the right to tell another person what his or her dream means based on certification or presumed authority. In commenting on one another’s dreams, we should begin by saying, “If it were my dream,” making it clear that we are offering our personal associations and projections, not presuming to tell the dreamer the definitive meaning of his or her dream. The work and example of Henry Reed, Monte Ullman, Jeremy Taylor, and grassroots dreamwork circles all over the United States helped to return dreams to the dreamers, affirming that we don’t need to be doctors or shrinks to offer helpful comments on someone else’s dreams. “Perhaps the most significant development concerning dreams in the latter decades of the twentieth century is returning them to their rightful owner, the dreamer,” says Reed,⁶ and I agree.

But more was required. Dream sharing needs to be fast enough to suit our busy schedules and Western hurry-sickness, and so fun and so helpful that people will want to do it as often as possible. Every dreamwork process — whether five minutes by the office coffee machine or in a dedicated dream group or workshop — needs to become an energy event that delivers juice as well as information. We want to bring energy as well as content from the place of dreaming, and we want to get that energy moving in the room and traveling beyond the room at the end of a conversation or session.