and fastened to their key rings.
I like key-ring amulets. Every time you take out your keys to enter your house or car, you are reminded of your dream, and you may find it is one of the most important keys on the chain. Some dreamers who have worked with me inscribe a catchphrase or “banner” from a dream on a tag and put that on their key ring. “It’s all about me” was the dream tag of a woman going through a difficult divorce after a dream instructed her that it was time to stop being a team player and insist on her own needs. Not original, but right for that particular life passage. And she can change the phrase when life, and her dreams, give her a fresh message.
Research is often an action required by a dream. Dreams can prompt us to do detailed research on content, ranging from an obscure word to the natural habits of an animal that appeared or a way to fix a fuse box. This can go far beyond simply clarifying the initial information. Dream clues can put us on the trail of very important discoveries, ranging from our connection to a spiritual tradition that is calling us, to a new book idea, to what’s going on behind closed doors in Washington.
When you dream of a certain animal, you’ll want to research its natural habits and habitat to understand its relevance to you and the way you relate to the natural path of your energies. This means doing something better than just consulting some guide to animal totems; it means studying the animal in the way of a naturalist, in nature if possible — perhaps on the way to feeding and nourishing it in your body and in the way you use that body.
That strange name you dreamed, or phrase in a language you don’t know, or know imperfectly, can be a clue to a world of knowledge that was previously closed to you. My life has been changed and my horizon of understanding expanded enormously by odd words left over from night dreams that have led me on long trails of research and exploration. Words like ondinnonk, for example, which sounded like nonsense until I discovered that, in archaic Huron-Mohawk, it means “the secret wish of the soul,” especially as revealed in dreams. Sometimes it has taken me years, or an improbable chain of chance events, to crack such codes, but in the age of the Internet, dream-directed research can speed along much faster than in the past.
Jung said that his dreams spurred all his important study. He observed in Memories, Dreams, Reflections: “All day long I have exciting ideas and thoughts. But I take up in my work only those to which my dreams direct me.” My own studies are similarly guided, but I would expand the word dreams to include waking experiences of meaningful coincidence when we feel we are receiving a secret handshake or a nudge or a wink from the universe.
The action a dream requires may be to carry and apply its navigational guidance. It’s my impression that the dream self is forever traveling ahead of the waking self, scouting the roads we have not yet taken. By studying closely where our dream self has traveled into the possible future, we can decide whether we want to follow in its tracks or take a different way. We may see a future event we cannot change but can handle better — and help others to handle better — because we remember and apply what showed up on our dream radar.
Here’s a moving example. Carol dreamed that her nephew told her that Cody, the beloved family dog, had died. In her dream, she then saw Cody as a bounding, frisky puppy, running around in a happy scene. In waking reality, Cody was elderly but still alive. Carol took the dream as an alert to be ready to support her brother’s family in the event of Cody’s death. She was with the family on the day Cody died. She was then able to tell them, “You know, Cody is still with you.” When she recounted her dream of seeing Cody in his new life as a bounding puppy, a sense of blessing and joy replaced the feelings of grief in the family. Soon Carol’s relatives were laughing as they shared reminiscences of Cody, including the day when he had nearly choked on a pecan pie.
Many dreams invite us to create from them and with them, through our favorite media and also through media with which we may be less familiar or less confident. Write, sculpt, draw, dance, paint, or move with the dream, and if you have friends or family who’ll play, turn it into performance or theater. Some dreams want to explode into paint on canvas. Others flow effortlessly into poetry. Some make us pick up our feet and move or dance. Some get us down on the floor with crayons or cutting up old magazines with scissors for a collage. Some dreams want to be baked or stirred.
Writing the Next Chapter
You can write the next chapter of a dream (or a life passage).
In a series of dreams, Jenny was attacked again and again by a horrible, scary black bug that was trying to invade her body. A gentle student of Buddhism, Jenny tried a gentle response. In dream reentry, she tried to dialogue with the bug. This bug was not in a talking mood. In a creepy, conscious dream experience, the bug tried to rip a hole in her torso to get inside.
When Jenny shared this, I suggested that if this were my dream, I would stop trying to converse with the bug, give up on further attempts at dream reentry, and instead write the “next chapter,” in which I would try to resolve everything in whatever way felt right.
Jenny accepted this assignment. She wrote a scene in which she cast the bug and the illness it represented out of her body and her life. When she read to an active dream circle the passionate, searing words she composed, we all saw and felt a tremendous positive shift in her energy and knew that she had just taken a huge step in healing.
What we can always do with a dream is enter it in our secret book.
Keeping Your Books of Night and Day
I am enamored of my journal.
— SIR WALTER SCOTT
When a lusty, ambitious young Scot named James Boswell first met Dr. Samuel Johnson, Johnson advised him to keep a journal of his life. Boswell responded that he was already journaling, recording “all sorts of little incidents.” Dr. Johnson said, “Sir, there is nothing too little for so little a creature as man.”
Indeed, there is nothing too little, or too great, for inclusion in a journal. If you are not already keeping one, please start today. Write whatever is passing through your mind, or whatever catches your eye in the passing scene around you. If you remember your dreams, start with them. If you don’t recall your dreams, start with whatever thoughts and feelings are first with you as you enter the day.
If you have any hopes of becoming a writer, you’ll find that journaling is your daily workout that keeps your writing muscles limber. If you are already a writer, you may find that as you set things down just as they come, with no concern for editors, critics, or consequences, you are releasing descriptive scenes, narrative solutions, characters — even entire first drafts — effortlessly.
Some of the most productive writers have also been prodigious journal keepers. Graham Greene started recording dreams when he was sixteen, after a breakdown in school. His journals from the last quarter century of his life survive in the all-but-unbreakable code of his difficult handwriting. First and last, he recorded his dreams, and — as I describe in detail in my Secret History of Dreaming — they gave him plot solutions, character development, insights into the nature of reality that he attributed to some of his characters, and sometimes bridge scenes that could be troweled directly into a narrative. Best of all, journaling kept him going, enabling him to crank out his daily pages for publication
