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.
Playing the Lightning Dreamwork Game
Building on the foundations laid by America’s dreamwork pioneers, I invented a simple, high-octane process for sharing dreams with a partner or a group that I dubbed Lightning Dreamwork because it is meant to be fast (it can be done in five minutes) and to focus energy, like a lightning strike.
It has four steps. Step 1 is to get the dreamer to tell her story as simply and clearly as possible, leaving out autobiography and explanations. Stories need titles, so the dreamer should be encouraged to come up with a title for her dream report. In this way, the dreamer is helped to claim the power of creating and telling stories, which is central to the art of conscious living. When we can tell our story in a way that others can hear and receive, we have acquired real power that can be applied to any situation, from ending a family drama to winning a new job or a book contract.
In step 2, the person who is hearing the dream asks a few questions to get the bare minimum of facts required to place the dream in a context and see how it may apply to the rest of the dreamer’s life, past, present, and future. The first question is always about feelings. How you feel immediately after a dream is the first and best guide to the nature of the dream. The next questions involve running a reality check on the dream. What does the dreamer recognize from her dream in the rest of her life? And is it remotely possible that any part of this dream could play out in the future, either literally or symbolically? I also like to ask the dreamer: What do you want to know about this dream?
Step 3 is to play the If It Were My Dream game. Anyone present during the telling of the dream gets to play. If you are commenting on someone else’s dream, you can do no wrong as long as you follow the simple rule of prefacing your opinions and associations by saying, “If it were my dream…” You are not allowed to interpret another person’s dream. You are going to pretend that her dream is your dream and talk about whatever comes to mind when you play that role, which might range from dreams of your own with a similar theme to your feelings about spiders and the one you found spinning a web over your bed.
Step 4 is to get the dreamer to come up with an action plan, by which I mean a specific and practical way to honor the dream. Sometimes even veteran dreamers are clueless when asked for an action plan. So in a Lightning Dreamwork session, we are all poised to make suggestions about how to move beyond talking to walking a dream.
On the way to an action plan, we ask the dreamer to come up with what Mark Twain called a “snapper,” a personal catchphrase that captures the essence of the dream and the insights that have come through in discussion. This is a neat way to retain a message, and it orients us toward doing something about it.
Come up with the right snapper, and it may lead you to the right snap decision.
I’m a Real Fox
Here’s an example of Lightning Dreamwork as informal everyday practice. A neighbor who works in state government stopped me on the street when I was walking my dog. John wanted to know if it would be okay for him to share a dream with me. I invited him to meet me at my house when my dog had done his business. Twenty minutes later, he told me the following dream:
I have taken on the role of a very important man. I have to find something of tremendous importance. I can’t get to it until the earth opens, and I am hurled into a kind of primal experience of earth changes over millions of years. I watch mountains rise and fall, and oceans grow and recede. I am in the magma of the living planet.
I find what I’m seeking. It’s doesn’t look like all that much. It’s an animal skull, not that big.
Then I’m back in the house as the important man. People jump to follow my orders. I tell them I know where exactly to dig. I point to the spot in the yard. They start digging, but their tools are no good. I tell them to go get better tools to do the job right.
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