grow our power as storytellers and communicators, build stronger friendships, and lay foundations for a new kind of community. Indigenous dreamers maintain, wisely, that if we don’t do something with our dreams, we do not dream well.
Second, Active Dreaming is a method of shamanic lucid dreaming. It starts with simple, everyday practice and extends to profound group experiences of time travel, soul recovery, and the exploration of multidimensional reality. It is founded on the understanding that we don’t need to go to sleep in order to dream. The easiest way to become a conscious or lucid dreamer is to start out lucid and stay that way. As a method of conscious dream navigation, Active Dreaming is not to be confused with approaches that purport to “control” or manipulate dreams; it is utterly misguided to seek to put the control freak that is the ego in charge of something immeasurably wiser and deeper than itself.
Third, Active Dreaming is a way of conscious living. This requires us to reclaim our inner child and the child’s gift of spontaneity, play, and imagination. It requires us to claim the power of naming and to define our life project. It invites us to discover and follow the natural path of our energies. It calls us to remember our bigger and braver story and tell and live it in such a way that it can be heard and received by others. It is about walking in everyday life as if we are moving through a forest of living symbols that are looking at us (to borrow from Baudelaire, who saw these things with a poet’s clarity). It is about navigating by synchronicity and receiving the chance events and symbolic pop-ups on our daily roads as clues to a deeper order. Beyond this, it is about grasping that the energy we carry and the attitudes we choose (consciously or unconsciously) have a magnetic effect on the world around us, drawing or repelling encounters and circumstances. When we rise to this perspective, we are able to welcome the things that block or oppose us as opportunities for course correction or as tests that will confirm us in our calling if we are willing to develop the courage and clarity to pursue it.
As Stephen Nachmanovitch writes in Free Play, “we can depend on the world being a perpetual surprise in perpetual motion. And a perpetual invitation to create.” To live consciously is to accept the challenge to create, which is to move beyond scripts and bring something new into the world.
IN PART 3 OF THIS BOOK, we’ll learn that this approach is not only for individuals and friends and families but also for communities, and that it will stimulate our deeper attunement to the cause of the earth. Active dreamers become Speakers for the earth and rise to full awareness of the truth of the indigenous wisdom that tells us we must be mindful of the consequences of our actions on others, down to the seventh generation beyond ourselves. Active dream groups can offer a model of intentional community and can foster a new mode of leadership devoted to empowering each member to claim her voice and play guide to others as they learn to speak and embody their own truth.
In the appendix, we’ll study documents from a possible future in which a Commonwealth of Dreamers has emerged, guided by priestess-scientists who are applying the gifts of dreaming to mend our world.
The child’s psyche is of infinite extent and incalculable age.
— CARL JUNG, “The Development of Personality”
To understand dreams and reclaim the practice of imagination, we must look to the master teachers: our inner children and the children around us. When very young, children know how to go to magic kingdoms without paying for tickets, because they are at home in the imagination and live close to their dreams. When she was four years old, my daughter Sophie had adventures in a special place called Teddy Bear Land, where she met a special friend. I loved hearing about these travels and encouraged her to make drawings and spin further stories from them.
One day Sophie sat down beside me and asked with great earnestness, “Daddy, would you like to know how I get to Teddy Bear Land?”
“I’d love to.”
“Sometimes I take the Sun Gate. Sometimes I take the Moon Gate. Sometimes I take the Tree Gate. Sometimes I take the Rainbow Bridge. And sometimes I just punch a hole in the world.”
I’ve never heard anyone say it better. To live the larger life, we need to punch a hole in the world. This is what dreaming — whether we are sleeping or waking or hyperawake — is really all about. On our roads to adulthood, we sometimes forget how to do it, just as older children in the Chronicles of Narnia cease to be able to see Aslan as they approach adolescence and become more and more burdened by the reality definitions of the grown-ups around them.
When we listen, truly listen, to very young children, we start to remember that the distance between us and the magic kingdoms is no wider than the edge of a sleep mask. True listening requires us to pay attention. To attend, according to its root meaning in the Latin, is to stretch ourselves, which requires us to expand our vocabulary of understanding. We owe nothing less to the young children in our lives. When we do this, we discover that they can be our very best teachers of how to dream and what dreaming can be.
What to Do When You’re Eaten by a T-Rex
“I was eaten by T-Rex.” Brian, aged seven, is rocking in his seat with excitement, but his voice is very soft. The fifteen kids in the circle, plus parents and grandparents, lean forward to hear him. We’ve gathered to spend a half day together at a local retreat center for a playshop I love to lead called Dreaming with Children and Families.
“Did T-Rex swallow you in one gulp?” Brian’s grandmother asks, making a gurgling in her throat as she mimics something very big taking a big gulp. “Or did he kind of munch on you?”
“It was a big gulp.” Brian’s eyes are gleaming with excitement. “Then I was falling down, down into T-Rex’s belly. I found two eggs. I cut them open and there were two baby T-Rexes inside. They came out and they killed the big T-Rex and I was fine.”
“How did you feel?” I ask.
“Grrreat!”
You don’t analyze a dream like this, whatever the age of the dreamer — at least not until you do something to grab the vital energy of the dream and embody it and bring it through to the present. This isn’t hard with Brian’s dream. We have a room full of excited kids, and kids are naturals for dream theater.
“Hey, Brian, would you like to playact your dream?”
Brian can’t wait. He chooses the two youngest children in the group, an angelic four-year-old named Abby who has just created a picture of one of her own dreams with crayons and sketch paper — a picture of a wild thing she has given her own name — and a toddler who has proved a virtuoso with maracas and other noisemakers from our communal music box.
“Aunt” Carol, our host at the retreat center and a gifted counselor and dream teacher, is picked to play the snapping head of T-Rex, a tricky role since
