1st Las Vegas Conference on
Integrating Therapy for Women
Las Vegas Hilton � May 19-21, 2004
Dream Work as a Sacred Practice Jackie Lowe Stevenson, MSSA, LISW (WMS24-013) Note: Square brackets [ ] are used to indicate inaudible or indecipherable text or unknown spellings, where text placed inside brackets represents transcriber's best guess. Caret brackets < > indicate descriptions of intonations, background noise, technical problems, etc.
STEVENSON: Good morning. My name is Jackie Lowe Stevenson, and I'm here to explore with you the relationship we have between our inner psyche, our deep well of feminine knowing, our capacity to be dreamers, and how we begin to create that relationship that becomes a place for us to move it into our external life; how we become dreamers, how we allow dreams to be part of our active way of being. So this morning we're going to do some exploring of dreams and some dream techniques and some experiential opportunities. Before I do that, I want to just make one quick announcement to bridge over from those of us who were lucky enough to be with Belleruth this morning. If you try to purchase any of her books or tapes and found them not available, if you go to the bookstore, there is a list and you can purchase whatever you would like and an order will be placed and mailed to you. We all are dreamers. We live in a culture where it's not so friendly to dreamers, but all of us have within us the strings, like strings of a harp, that if we begin to stroke them and to pluck them and to play, the world of dreams will create a resonance and a harmony. I think we often have more strings within us, like the strings of a harp, that are available to us all the time, but we haven't heard the tone or we don't know they are there. So part of the dream world is about opening to more of the full range of who we are. Our culture often denies dreams. There is a way in which if we talk about dreams, it's often a statement like, �Well, not in your wildest dreams,� or, �Keep on dreaming.� But, in fact, dreams are a way that we begin to open the range of more fully who we are. I'm a psychotherapist in private practice, and I also work with women on retreats. A core part of my work is to be able to support myself and others to have more access to their dreams, to their visions, to their hopes, to the intuitive part of them that is so desperately needed at this time of our lives and in the world that we live in. Most of the work I do with my clients is outside. I work with my clients mostly in nature, and the natural world is so alive with dreams and so alive with images. The first thing I would say to us as dreamers is that the more embodied we are, the more physically embodied we are, the more capacity we have to live in the physical way, the more capacity we'll have to be dreamers. We might think about dreams as being passive or dreams as being part of our imagination or dreams happen at night when we're not moving, but actually, sometimes at night we are more in our bodies than we are during the day. Often the only time we attend to our bodies is when they hurt, when they need to be fixed, when they're hungry, when they're thirsty, and we often don't really attend to the more pleasurable sensations of being in the body, or of the wind across our face, of the soft feel of grass on our feet, of the stroke of a soft touch. Most often when we're thinking about being in our bodies, it's when we're in pain. So the first thing I would say is that if we're to be active dreamers, if we're to be juicy dreamers, if we're to be dreamers that support ourselves and our clients to dream, it's not at all disconnected to our physical body, but, in fact, the more fully we own our senses, the more rich and alive our dream images will be. The more rich and alive our senses are with music and poetry and with human touch and with art and creativity, the livelier our dreams will be; and as we have that lively dream world, it then enriches our capacity to experience the world in a lively way. I don't think that the dilemmas of dreamers are that we don't have enough dreams. The dilemma probably is more that we have so many dreams that we don't know which ones to attend to and which ones to follow. Part of our birthright, the feminine birthright � and that's true for men or women � is that we're born with so many seeds, the possibilities of dreams within us, and our task is then to decide which dreams we honor and which dreams we let go; which dreams are ours for the moment and which dreams are to be released. These dreams are messages from our deep interior. These dreams are available to us around supporting our physical wellbeing. These dreams are available to us to find out more about where we've come from, where we're to go, they help us in our decision making, they keep us on track with what is our most unique sense of self; our most authentic self in the moment. Our dreams are often that part of our being which is most needing to be listened to, and in a conscious way, the least available. The information, the messages, the direction that we most need is often in our dreams, and our conscious mind has such a strong presence that it often tries to defeat the capacity of our dream world to be lively. Some of what we're going to look at this morning is how do we tend to our dreams, how do we allow our dreams to be a lively, available part of our being. One of the things that I was really struck with � this was my first trip to Las Vegas; I've never been here � I went out walking last night and got very confused. I walked into one hotel and couldn't find my way out. I kept wandering in circles, and finally just followed �exit� and found myself outside somewhere in the back of the hotel, and found my way back around to the front. I walked down the streets and found fountains spouting fire and water at the same time, and battles happening on ships in the middle of streets with cars going by. I'm really watching people, some smiling and some frowning. But this place is all about dreams. It's all about the hope of winning. It's all about illusion. It's all about projecting out images that we might hope to be true. It's all about fantasy. I think the part I took from being here is how important it is to all of us to have hopes and dreams, and I think the difference between that and what we're going to work with this morning is that those dreams are projected out. Those are our dreams that get put out there as if they could be met in the world outside of ourselves. I think it really comes out of our deepest urge to dream. What we're going to look at more this morning is how do we go inside and find those dreams; how do we go inside to that rich world that belongs to us. One of the most often-asked questions is how do I know if my dream is real; how do I know if I didn't just make it up; how do I know that it's just not my thoughts, and how do I get more in my body and out of my head? Well, the first thing that I want to say is that our bodies do include our heads, so our head is part of our body. It is often an overused part of our body, but it certainly is a part of our body. Whether those thoughts come from your head or your heart or kind of the deep place in your belly or your soul, they're part of your energetic field and they are there to teach us something. Part of the work that I find most appealing about dreams is done by a method called dream tending. A man by the name of Stephen Aizenstat , who teaches at Pacifica and started Pacifica Institute in Santa Barbara, works with what's called dream tending, and so this work this morning is taken from Stephen's work, from some of Angeles Arian's work, who does some cross-cultural, Robert Moss, who does a lot of work with dreaming � both awake dreaming and asleep dreaming � and some of Clarissa Pinkola Estes' work, and what I've learned from other dreamers and from my own dreams. When we look at dreaming, the second most often-asked question is what's the most important book for me to read about dreams? Where do I go to begin this exploration? And I would say that the most important book you will ever have for dreaming is your own dream journal. It's not that it's not going to be interesting to read other people's experiences because we certainly learn that books are a very engaging way. It's very important to read books. It gives us access to other people's thinking. Especially if we're really in deep relationship with books, we certainly learn a lot; but if you're looking for the expert dream book for you, it's your dream journal. So what I would encourage you to do, if you don't already, is to begin to keep a dream journal. In that dream journal will be a cast of characters that may come once and never again, or may come over a period of time, or images that kind of float, maybe even just half-images or wisps; they may not even be fully-developed stories. But if you capture whatever you can in your dream journal, whether it's with a notepad next to your bed and a flashlight in the middle of the night, or the last wisp of the dream as you remember it as you wake up, to begin to keep your dream journal. There are four typical dream states. I'd like to have us stay open to all four of them. One is our deep sleep � the dreams that happen when we're deeply asleep. We spend about a third of our lifetime sleeping, and it's rich with images and dreams. So the dreams that we have at night � and generally there are a minimum of five, 45-minute periods of dream states during the night, whether we remember them or not. Whether you remember your dreams or not, they are really working in our best interest. There are many dreams that we have that are healing dreams or teaching dreams. You may wake up in the morning and not remember a dream, but you just feel different; something is different upon awakening. Maybe you're more settled, maybe you're less settled, but the dream has begun to do its work, whether you remember your dreams or not. The other dream state is what we call the twilight dream state. It happens in those precious moments right before we fall asleep at the very end of the day � that kind of semi-consciousness between dream time, between sleep time and awake, just before we fall asleep. Often there are lively images during that time of sleep. One of the things you might want to pay attention to is not just the dreams that come from your deep dream time in the middle of the night, but those images, those thoughts, the characters, the feel of the quality of the experience just before you fall asleep. The other magical time is just before we come fully awake. It's kind of that moment where we're just becoming awake and we're not quite fully awake. If you can kind of suspend that time and not quickly bring yourself to awake or to the lists of things you need to do but just dwell in that place for a little bit longer and allow the images to come, it's a very rich time of dream images. The third aspect is your daydreams. I think from an early, early age often we're told, �Don't daydream.� You're sitting in class and you're looking out the window in school and you daydream, and someone raps on your knuckles or calls on you for the math questions, and you are rudely snapped out of your daydream. That moment when our body intuitively goes into a more inner quiet and deeper place, a well of knowing, and brings something to the surface, are really precious. So before you quickly dismiss your daydream, give yourself permission to invite it, to have a presence in your day and a presence in your life so that you can honor the dream. Dreams will come to us the more we honor them, the more we're in good relationship with them. Good relationship means giving time and space and respect and listening. The other quality of relationship is patience. If we quickly grab hold of the dream and quickly interpret the dream, what begins to happen is our consciousness, which really is in some way in a tug-of-war with our unconsciousness, will quickly, in its familiar habitual way, take over and make meaning of the dream so that the psyches trying to come up and speak to us � that inner voice, that inner knowledge of the dream, which very much is like a fragile, new growth of a plant � is easily stepped on by our conscious psyche because often the internal is disrupting something that is familiar; a familiar pattern. So if we interpret our dreams, what will begin to happen is what we already know will come out as opposed to what we're trying to discover. So part of this daydream is to not so quickly either discount it or make meaning of it, but kind of sit in an open, curious, �I wonder what's unfolding,� �I wonder what it is I have to learn from this daydream.� The fourth dream state is an induced, lucid dream, and these are the dreams, for those of you that were with Belleruth this morning, the guided imagery is an example of lucid dreaming, where you move into a state of imagery, you quiet your body, you begin to let go of the chatter of your head and move into a receptive, available place for images to come forward. They can come forward in guided imagery, they can come forward in dance, they can come forward as we begin to create poetry or art, where the whole world � if you've ever been immersed in a project of art � disappears, and there's only you and the images being created. So I think lucid dreaming takes place in artwork, it takes place in movement, it takes place in imagery, it takes place in conscious evoking of the dream state. Many indigenous cultures work with lucid dreaming as a part of daily practice. Whether working with drums or rattles, there's a state � it's often called a Shamanic Journey � where the rhythm of the drum begins to shift our brainwave into a theta wave that allows us to begin to have images come forth. That is a very rich world of induced dream work. You're not asleep, but you're not distracted by the outer world. You're really focused in-world to that capacity of imagination and dreaming and inner-knowing, kind of that deep well of self. There are many cultures that are very dream-friendly. The Native American culture which our cultures are built on�most of us that live here are living on land that Native Americans lived on and are still living on, and their dream world is very alive. The dream world of before a person was to make a decision, they would invoke the ancestors, they would cross that veil into the ancestral realm and tap into what is available from the ancestral realm. If a hunt was to happen, there was a ceremony of dance and drumming as a way to move into a lucid dream state so they could make connection with the animal world to know where the herd was to hunt, and to invite that relationship, not of dominance but of reciprocal need of inner-connectedness, so that the hunt would go well. In healing work, often drums, rattles, chanting, or dance begin to invoke the presence of a realm that can begin to support physical healing and spiritual healing of the overlay. Those are the four types of dream state. There are two primary directions of dreams. One is the dream is a reflection of self. It's kind of all about us, and we're going to look at how we look at dreams as a way to know more about self because it represents owned parts of ourselves, disowned parts of ourselves. We can also look at dreams as not self at all, and I think that's really more the way the indigenous people look at dreams � the dream has its own identity. It has something to teach us on its own terms. We can bring the dream into our human realm and have it be speaking to us from the human realm, or we can leave the human realm and enter the dream realm that's being presented. When we're in nature we can do the same thing. When we are in nature, we can go into nature and have it be all about us. This tree is there to shade me. All of the images that I get from the waters of a creek are speaking to me, about me, about my river, about my waters. We can also look at the images of nature in our relationship, and many of you probably have. When you go into the mountains or into the streams or into the desert, there are voices of the desert that are in its own terms. There's a voice of the ocean that may be speaking to us that tell us about life that has nothing to do with our own egocentric way of looking. So we're going to look at that possibility. The other possibility of dream is to look at three kinds of dreams. One is kind of the small dream. It's the dream that we have the wisp of that comes to us every now and then that seems to inspire us in some way. There is the big dream, which when you have those dreams, it's a dream that if you never wrote it down, you would never forget it. It has presence. It also seems to be a dream that's more than about you. This feels like a dream that is a collective dream that has meaning beyond your world, beyond just you. In some communities we call them community dreams. The third is the dream within the dream. Those dreams when you're sleeping and dreaming and then you feel like in your dream you are dreaming again and again. Those are very rich dreams to pay attention to because they begin to take us deeper and deeper into our capacity to pull up that which needs to be known for us. One of the dream cultures, the Sanoi dream culture, is very unlike our own. I want to put it out there to put it in contrast of our own dream world, but in this culture, dreams are tended from the time children are very little. It's one of the responsibilities, one of the key responsibilities of parents to teach their children about the dream world. So when children are very young, the first thing that happens when they come to the breakfast table is that the children tell their dreams, and they are encouraged to tell their dreams or whatever part of their dream that they remember. Then there is some instruction about that dream. For example, if a child is being chased by a wild animal in the dream, the elder or the parent might say, �So what did you do?� and the child might say, �Well, I ran. I ran as fast as I could and I just kept running.� The parent might say, �Well, that makes sense, but what happens if you can't outrun this wild animal? What might your choices be? One choice might be you could call for help. You could call for help in your dream. There may be someone who knows about this animal. There might be someone who can protect you from this animal, so you could call for help. You could call to the animal itself and ask what it has to teach you and that you are there to learn from what that animal is. You could turn and face that animal and tell it to be gone or to stop.� What we're really confronting is our fear. So what the parents are teaching the children through working with their dreams is how to face danger; that you can get help, that you can turn and face your danger and maybe you can outrun it with some help, but there is a range of ways. So a lot of teaching about how to be safe in the world happens as they interface with their dreams. Again, if we don't quickly jump to take action, if we kind of stay with, well, what does it feel like in this dream to be dreaming this, what's really going on here, what is the teaching, it may be that we're getting a message of how to behave in this dream, and it may be our conscious mind trying to shut the dream down. So we kind of stay with maybe both possibilities and allow for the paradox of multiple realities to be true in our dream. So in this dream culture where many of those kinds of things probably happen all of the time, the next thing that happens is that the people who have dreams go to the center of the village, and they tell their dreams to each other. Out of the collective dream of the culture, they are told what to do for the day. It may be a day to go fishing or hunting or that everybody should stay close to the village or that it's a day for people to go out questing, but that comes from the collective capacity of the village to dream. So the daily life of the village depends on honoring the dreams. It is a very real part. I'm not sure that will work in all of our lives, or I'm not sure you'll ever get corporate America to bring all of their executives into the boardroom to share their dreams, although it might be more effective than some of what's happening and certainly is a missing piece. I'd like to begin to look at a particular method of dream work, which is called Dream Tending. We're going to look at a way in which we can play with our dreams. I want to invite you to take a moment and settle in your chair and enter that time of lucid dreaming � the time when we're awake. I hardly ever go anywhere without my drum, and I didn't bring my drum with me so I asked the hotel and they brought me a bucket. Every culture has its own way of drumming and uses whatever material for it. I'm not used to that sound so what I found was <makes continual drumming sounds>. I want to invite you to take a few moments to listen to the heartbeat of the drum. You might want to close your eyes and find your own heartbeat. A drum is a really amazing form of communication. All cultures had drums. There is evidence of these drums on cave walls and petroglyphs that are over 25,000 years old, and on these cave walls were often images of the dreams that people had. As you listen to the drumbeat, look at the petroglyphs that are written inside the cave walls of your own soul, your own heart, your own interior, and maybe allow yourself to think of, or let a dream emerge that has come to you maybe last night, maybe in the last couple of days, maybe not a whole dream but an image or a wisp. Maybe there is a dream that you had as a young child � a reoccurring dream, a dream that has followed you all through your life, maybe just a wisp or an image. So take a few moments and see if you can find that wisp of dream. <Continues to drum.> As you are finding that wisp of dream, take a couple of nice, easy breaths in and out, and let that dream have some breath; let that dream have a presence for you. If it's a dream that brings out something uncomfortable, you can ask it what it has to teach you or see if in some way it will give you some room and space. <Continues to drum.> As you are ready, bring yourself back to the room. And if you'll just take a moment, if you've got a pencil with you, and write down maybe two sentences about that dream. If you don't have a pencil or writing isn't what feels like how to hold your dream, as you bring your eyes open, let it reside in your awake place. It's kind of approachable in your fingertips whether or not you write it. <Stops drumming.> What I'd like to do is look at this notion of dream tending. If you had an image that came to you, or a wisp of a dream, or a dream from childhood, or a remembered dream, we're going to take this dream and work with it in a way that allows us to carry it through three different ways. We're going to look at the key to dream work as association, amplification, and animation. Dreams are not static. They're a field alive with characters, images walking around, having collisions, having encounters, shifting, moving, transforming, disappearing, and popping up in new places. The dream loves to be met by its dreamer, both within the dream and outside the dream. So we're going to begin to work with our dream outside the dream a little bit. The first part of the dream, in working with it, is your individual relationship with the dream: your personal relationship, your associations with the dream, and those associations might be the meaning that you bring to the images. So you'll want to pay attention to the place of the dream, the setting of the dream, the elements. Is there a season? What are the elements of nature? What is the location? When did it happen? Was it in this century? Did it happen a long time ago? Does it have a future? What is the setting of this dream? This is the entering into the beginning of the dream, the staging where the dream takes place. Is it indoors or outdoors, in a city, in a room? Is it underground? What is the context and what is the setting of this dream? Secondly, who are the characters in this dream? They might be the character of the wind. It could be a human character, an animal character, and it could be an emotion like fear. All of the different elements of the dream are dream images that you can write down. Third, what is the mood of the dream? Is it fearful, is it happy, and is it excited? And generally in dreams we have many moods. We might go from being afraid, to turning and facing our dream and the fear going down, or we might start out very calm and become frightened, or we might start out happy in our dream and move into a more quiet introspective place. We might be very animated; we might be very soulful. So what is the mood of the dream and what are the changing moods of the dreams? What are the actions in the dream? What are the actual occurrences? What's happening in the dream? Are you running? Are you jumping somewhere? Are you opening doors? Are you taking off your clothes? Are you meeting an old friend? What are the actions, the verbs that are alive in your dream? Once you have these four components written down or sketched out in some way � they could be written in words, you could paint them, you could move them � but once you have some feel of them, the association is what do those particular images mean to you? One of the things to look at is what has happened in the last 48 hours. What has happened in your life in the last 48 hours before this dream? If you're picking up a childhood dream, what has happened in these last 48 hours that somehow reflect, inspire, or interest you about your dream? So the 48-hour context is a place to begin with your association. What's happened in these last 48 hours, and how does that apply to each of your images or your dream, each of your associations? If you have a butterfly in your dream, you could go to a dream book and find out what butterfly means, and typically it might mean transformation. It might mean taking flight. It could be spreading your wings. It might be many things, but the important thing is in this particular dream what are the possible things it could mean to you and to not stop with the first one. It could mean for me that moving. Butterflies never stay in one place long. They move from flower to flower. So it may mean for me that I need to pay attention that I'm staying too long in one place, or maybe I'm not staying long enough in one place. The butterfly may have something to do with transformation. It may have something to do with fragility because the wings of a butterfly are very fragile. So part of it may be what are the meanings for you. You might take apart�in terms of what does a butterfly remind you of, it may remind me of summertime. A butterfly might remind me of carefree. I might look at the words �butter,� �fly.� Well, what does butter represent to me? What is creating butter from milk, kind of that stirring cream long enough to become butter to transform into something else? So we begin to look at what are all of the possible ranges? Not just the first thing that comes to mind, because often the first thing that comes to mind is your consciousness making meaning of something which is so useful in many ways, but in the dream world it may interrupt and stop more of the meaning to come forward. So in dream tending, we're not interpreting what it means; we're inviting the dream to come to us, to tell us more. If I have a particular dream, I'm going to want to hold it through the day, and maybe check in later in the morning and bring that image back and see what it now means. So we're continuing to honor the dream by inviting all its possible meanings. So that's our associations, and it's typically the way many people work with dreams. It really is pretty much about us. The second aspect of dreaming is amplification. Amplification is the larger story of the dream, the archetypal energy of the dream. It's symbolic of the larger issues of life. So if I am dreaming about falling, I might look at what story talks about falling. Is it falling in love? Is it falling under a spell? Is it falling into an abyss? Is it falling from the sky? Is it falling forward? Am I falling backward? And what are the possible stories? Is it falling from grace? What are the possible archetypal stories about falling? And there are many, many, many stories about falling. What I then begin to want to do is, out of all these archetypal stories, which one of them is mine? Which story has the most resonance at this particular time? Is it more about falling in love? Is it a Cinderella story? Is it falling in love with any of the different, more expensive ways of loving? What is this story for me? If you look at any of the biblical stories, Shakespearean stories, classic stories, folk stories, stories that passed from generation to generation, those are more the archetypal stories. The characters may change, but they're about abandonment, they are about loss, they're about conquering, they're about aspiring, they're about challenging, they're about overcoming, they're about success, and they're about failure. So we look at the complexity of the archetypal dream world. I live right next to Lake Erie. Ohio, for many people that don't know, is really one of the northern states. So I'm right on Lake Erie, and then there's Canada, and I often have a dream about swimming. So I begin to think about what has happened. Am I swimming against the current? Am I awash in emotions? Am I in water because I'm moving into a deeper place of emotion? What are my associations with water? I might take it to an archetypal image of Mother Ocean: the ocean as giver of life, the ocean as the possibility of an undersea world. So what are the archetypal stories about water? We begin to then look at what does it say about the whole of the human condition. Is this dream just for me? Is this a community dream? Is this one of the larger dreams? So that's the level of amplification. The third level is animation, and if you ever saw the movie Fantasia with all of the different characters, you'll notice that in one of the sequences Mickey Mouse as the wizard is bailing water, and the brooms come alive, and the buckets come alive, and the water comes alive, and they are all essences and images in their own realm. They have a life of their own. He has no control over them. They're doing what they're doing, and they have their own ego lifestyle. So if we look at animation, we look at what is it that your dream image represents that has nothing to do with you; that has nothing to do with your associations. For example, if I were to dream of water and my own associations and then the amplification of Mother Ocean, the animation might be that the ocean might say to me, �I'm choking. I can't breathe. There is debris in me. I need you to pay attention to how you are treating water,� or it may come and say, �Pay attention to how much water you use. Without water there would be no life. There would be no birthing. There would be no blood flowing through you.� What I'm here to tell you is to pay attention to life, pay attention to your life force, pay attention to life in general, and that may be the animation of the image. Their own reason for being. And if you quickly speak for them, they won't speak to you. So part of it is very much like any relationship you're in. If you project on someone what you think, or want, or hope they'll be, you generally get disappointed, or you come up with what you think you saw or believe them to be. So this is not about projecting yourself. It's inviting the dream image into the room on its own terms. I'll take a pause and take some questions. AUDIENCE: <Inaudible comment.> STEVENSON: Well, it probably takes letting go of our way of thinking that the human species is the only species that has intelligence. It probably takes letting go of, maybe even in some slight way, being dominant over the world. It probably takes more of the kind of relationship where you might assume that water or trees or the Earth has its own being. They were all there before we ever showed up, and it probably requires that we be in a relationship that believes that there are life forces and intelligence that are not better than or less competent than our own but exist on their own terms, and that if we allowed that possibility, we can be in a rich relationship with non-human species, whether they're animals or plants or the elements, that is more of an equal relationship. AUDIENCE: <Inaudible comment.> STEVENSON: Well, it probably could be a lot of things. The question was what if you have a reoccurring dream over and over again? It could mean a lot of things. One is it could be some unfinished business with that particular dream, and it's going to keep coming up until you get it. It's our psyche's way of saying, �I'll say it again, and I'll say it again, and maybe you'll get it.� So that might be it. It also might be that we got it, but it's a support to us to stay on track. I had a series of dreams about horses about two years ago. It was a reoccurring dream that the horses would be out in traffic. I have horses at home, so there is this real fear that during the night they're going to knock the fence down or kick their stall open and get out in traffic. I would dream that the horses were out in traffic, or they had knocked their stalls open or had broken the fence down. Part of what was happening for me in my life is in my psyche there was a part of me that wasn't being listened to and was at great risk. These horses in traffic, part of my fear is that they were going to get hit by a car and that some harm would come to them because they're in a place that isn't nurturing for them. It isn't their natural habitat. Horses don't belong in the middle of the street. Maybe they don't even belong in fences. Some part of them needed to get out. What I began to look at was what in my life felt trapped, and what part of me was at risk of being harmed, and I felt kind of grateful in the dream that the horses remained safe. It felt like kind of a wake-up call to say there is something going on in your psyche that is dissatisfied or not being heard, some part of you is at risk and it needs to be tended to, and it happened over and over again until I began to really change some of my life and give myself more space, more time, to not put myself in dangerous situations to my own psyche by kind of what Belleruth talked about � being off track, being out of alignment. Once I started to pay more attention and bring my work and my life into better balance, the dream started changing. The horses were in pastures. They weren't in danger any longer. They would run free. Sometimes they had riders on them and sometimes they didn't, but the tone of the dream changed. I'd have a reoccurring similar dream, and this dream seemed to say, �Hey, you're on track. Keep it up.� So I think these reoccurring dreams keep saying, �A little to the left, a little to the right, not quite yet� or are encouragement dreams, �Hey, you're on track. Keep it up.� I think also that if we have a reoccurring dream, it's kind of like an onion. We may have gotten the first layer of it, but there is another layer to it; it's a deeper layer. It also might mean that we understand the dream, but it's a dream that is one of those big dreams. It's not just about us, but it really is for more than us. Is there some way we take that dream and begin to take the wisdom of it and manifest it in the world, get it places it need to get to? So those are maybe some of the possibilities, and there may be more. AUDIENCE: <Inaudible comment.> STEVENSON: That's a great question. People often ask, if I'm sleeping in the same bed with somebody, if I'm in the same house, in the community�I'm really moving from research and data of how people have thought of dreams of my own, but I'd also say when you ask a question, to trust what you think your answer is about it as well. So what I think is not the definitive authority about it, it really comes from my working with dreams and my take on it. I think that dreaming is part of the collective consciousness and that often we are tapping into dreams that are outside of our own experience. We have the possibility of this kind of morphic way of, in our dreams, pulling beyond any experience we ever had. One of the interesting things that is happening in the Native American community is a number of the important ceremonies and rituals were interrupted. It was against the law to practice them, and they were not able to be passed generation to generation. What some of the people are doing � the elders with the younger people � are creating dream circles, and they're going back in their dreams and they're being given the ceremonial ways of being; they're being given the ritual practices. The interesting thing is you'll have people in different places and different tribes, who've never met each other, and they're all coming up with similar images and rituals, or you have people dreaming in different places who are having similar dreams. So I think we do have access to more than our own experience, but I think the more we are alive, the more possibilities there are to make those larger, energetic leaps. I do think it has to be when we're excited about life, when we're on track, when we're fully vibrant and alive, we make those leaps in a more likely way. AUDIENCE: <Inaudible comment.> STEVENSON: Uh-huh, to begin with, right. The door between the ancestral realm, which is part of that dream world, is an everyday doorway; as real as the doorway walking out into the hallway and back in. AUDIENCE: <Inaudible comment.> STEVENSON: I think time is linear in our human way of being. Time is our calendar, our minutes, our hours; a way that we organize to make life manageable and to create meaning in a world that could be somewhat complex, but there also may be a reality at the same time that things happen simultaneously. Or in our dream world, we time travel forward or backward or sideways. So we may be, in fact, moving into the future to bring things into our dream and then forecast them out. When you think about a lot of the biblical dreams of Joseph and dreaming the dreams, many dreams of people that saved communities happened through people dreaming. So that being said, also to not take our dreams too literally, which are the dreams that literally are warnings or literally are the path to take, and what are the dreams that are much more complex? Typically, people might say, �I dreamt of someone dying. Should I be concerned? Should I worry about that? Should I call that person?� and I'd say begin to look at what do dreams of dying mean. Dreams of dying could bring us to this moment to say you better really appreciate life, that it's a call to life and to know that we are temporal. So how are you living your life right now? It may not be about that. It may be that an aspect of our life is dying. If you look at the seasons and the leaves falling off of the trees, what do we need to shed in order to get ready for new growth to happen? That might be about death. It may be a forecasting of someone around us. So if someone has those dreams, I might say it could be about any of those things so stay interested in what it might mean to you; and if it is going to help you be more settled, make the call and check in. �How are you doing? What's going on? I was worried about your wellbeing. I had a dream and it told me to pay attention.� So I pay attention when people say, �Should I go out and tell that person about my dream?� Is there a way in which you could make it a teaching dream? Many of those dreams are teaching dreams, and what might you do to support the broadest sense of learning about those dreams? AUDIENCE: <Inaudible comment.> STEVENSON: I agree with you completely. Our dreams are making every best attempt to help us heal. I think what Belleruth was supporting is how can we develop skills for ourselves and others so that dream time isn't just an unconscious happening, but we begin to be able to use dreams in a way that they're not just repetitive � like Groundhog Day , the movie, where it keeps happening again and again � but to begin to listen in a way that the healing can be more present for us, and to be able to work with the dreams and the healing images, and work with our clients with the healing images. I think healing happens when we're in relationship. It happens when we're in relationship with compassion and tenderness and caring and heart, and it's not just repetitive emotions. There's a difference between cathartic emotions that just get expressed but no real change happens, and I think dreams can be the same way. I think intuitively the beauty of the dream world is that there is something that begins to help us build the capacity to be healed within the dreams, but to the extent that we can work in good relationship with the dreams, I think we can really expand the capacity of the dreams to be healing dreams and not just repetitive, traumatic experiences. AUDIENCE: <Inaudible comment.> STEVENSON: I think there are people who are more gifted dreams and kind of come to it naturally. There are those who embrace dreaming. It's not that we don't have enough dreams; it's how do we call them forward and how do we know which seeds to water and which ones to let go. Many of you might have had visions of great ideas, and they were perfect for the moment, and the window opened for that dream to come into full reality or it didn't, and maybe it was a dream before it's time, and maybe we got distracted and didn't support that dream. Maybe we didn't have enough support around us to support the dream, which is why community dreaming is so important. AUDIENCE: <Inaudible comment.> STEVENSON: Right. Sometimes you may have had a dream and you don't remember it, and you've been wrestling with a difficulty, and you wake up just knowing something different happened�just kind of being sure about yourself or about something. There is a quote from the Velveteen Rabbit that reminds me of this. It's, � What is real? Ask the rabbit.� �Real isn't how you are made,� said Skinhorse, �It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long, time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become real.� I think that's really what happens. When we begin to love our dreams long enough, we don't just play with them to discard them, to not take them seriously. When we're in that kind of a relationship with our dreams, then they become more real to us and more available to us. AUDIENCE: <Inaudible comment.> STEVENSON: Yeah, that's one of the ways. One is to ask it what it has to tell you. And in that Senoi dream culture that I mentioned, that's one of the things that they teach the children; that you can change the ending. How would you want it to be? How would you like it to be? How will it be useful for you? So that's one tradition. There's another tradition where you tell your dream to three people. They are your counsel, and each of them come up with a different ending for your dream for you and offer you three different endings. There's something about the number three. It doesn't change it; it's not about changing or discounting your dreams, but it's about expanding the multiple realities of choice. It doesn't say, �Oh, that's now how it ended. We've changed the ending.� It's about, �Well, that's one ending, pick another one, and another one, and another one. Which ending will serve you most at this time?� So it's a wonderful form of dream work. AUDIENCE: <Inaudible comment.> STEVENSON: Right. If it's a warning dream and we change it too quickly, then we might lose the warning and what it's bringing up. I think that's the paradox of dreams, but in dreams both may be true. Both are always true. So what is the message of warning that may bring you, and when you begin to look at the different outcomes, the different outcomes will be different voices of how to teach you how to work with that dream so you don't just get stuck, like, �Oh, now what do I do?� but that there are multiple realities happening. What we want to do is to expand our range, not limit it, and to look at what's familiar and habitual about how I do myself in this dream and what the less-developed part is. So if I would always fight back in a dream, what would happen if I didn't fight back? If I gave up in a dream, what would happen if I turned and faced it? It's looking at what the polarities are, what the range is, what's the more developed part of us, and what's the less developed part of ourselves in our dreams? AUDIENCE: <Inaudible comment.> STEVENSON: Two different dreams of two people, sure. I mean, I think that one of the things in cultures, especially dream cultures, is that when there is � like you talked about � this counsel of dreaming, each dream might have something to say to one another. So I might bring out one of my dream images, maybe a dream image of a horse. What are some of the dream images that people had? AUDIENCE: Money STEVENSON: Money, okay. So we might make a dream counsel of horse, money � what are some of the others? AUDIENCE: Ambulance. STEVENSON: An ambulance. AUDIENCE: Plane crashes. STEVENSON: So we could take all of those images and have a dialogue between the images. We might be having a community issue � well, we certainly have a community issue � of how can we have the world be a safer place for everyone to live in. So that might be our community issue. And we might pull all of those dream characters and put them in dialogue with each other and see what they have to offer. AUDIENCE: <Inaudible comment.> STEVENSON: Say more about that. AUDIENCE: <Inaudible comment.> STEVENSON: Two dreams where two people are dreaming it? Well, that's very interesting. What do you think? Have you had experience with that? It's coming from somewhere. I'm trusting because the image is coming to you, that, in fact, it does happen. As you say it, I can feel it resonating into me as an �of course.� So have I read it to give authenticity in terms of scientific experiment? No, but I trust that kind of internal resonance that says of course that's true. How could it not be true? And I think trusting, as you say it, listening to your voice and how you speak it, it's obviously true. You think what? AUDIENCE: <Inaudible comment.> STEVENSON: Could be, because again we're looking at time travel. That might be what is � AUDIENCE: <Inaudible comment.> STEVENSON: That they had history before, and it's coming out in the dreams. Could be. AUDIENCE: <Inaudible comment.> STEVENSON: Absolutely. I think that it's a way of taking it through our fingers, through our hands, to letting it be more in a material way. But it depends. It could be either way. If you think about what you want to create in the dream or in your sand and make it happen whether it fits or not, you may be projecting your thoughts and your consciousness onto that sand tray. If you are interested in a less dominant relationship with your medium and kind of let it begin to teach you and maybe be willing to cover it over and start again, you're more likely to get the images that are more dream-like into your creative work. We can assume that all dreams are for good purpose and that it's a matter of us really unearthing the usefulness of the dream. There are a couple of things that I think about that support us as dream workers. One is to just be interested and curious and available to your dreams. Allow yourself to own the fact that we're all dreamers; really give yourself permission to be a dreamer. Keeping a dream journal, writing down your dreams, will begin to give you access to them longer so that you can go back and revisit them. It may be just one word you write down. You don't have to write the whole dream. You can just write down key phrases. Maybe, for you, it's just a motion or a movement or a color or an image, a symbol, but to begin to create a context. The other thing about a dream journal is you'll be able to track the themes of your dreams. If you have a reoccurring dream or a variation, you'll begin to track the pattern of your dream. Before you go to sleep at night, just remind yourself you're going to dream, and it probably will stimulate your dreams. If you can get yourself a dream partner � someone you can call up in the morning and say, �I had this dream. I really want to tell you. Tell me your dreams.� Having a dream partner so that the first thing that happens in the morning is you can share your dreams with someone will begin to support you as being a dreamer. There is a Tibetan dream practice that says that if you're having a hard time remembering your dreams, you should sleep the opposite direction in your bed. Either turn your bed around or just sleep in the opposite direction, and move into all four directions. Every three days, sleep in a different direction. It's something about breaking up the field of a familiar pattern. You can create dream pillows, and you can create ceremonial tools � dream catchers that might support your way of dreaming. One of the things that I think is really useful is to create your individual dream counsel. So if you have an image, whether it's an ambulance or a horse or the wind or some image that is powerful for you, is to write about it very much like a cast of characters in your journal. If you have a dilemma, you might want to go back to the characters of your dreams. It might be, �I have a dilemma. Should I be changing jobs, or should I be moving out of town? Is this the work I should be doing?� and give it to your dream characters. You know something about them. They're active people in your life. They're active relationships. The wind might tell you one thing, the horse might tell you another, the ambulance may tell you another, and the butterfly might tell you another. Therefore, you will have a circle of images that all have input for whatever it is that you're playing with. AUDIENCE: <Inaudible comment.> STEVENSON: The question is how could people dream things about different cultures, a different race, or a different time if it's not part of their current experience? It goes back to the collective conscience that there is a dream field that is energetically more expansive than our literal field of communication, and I think we have access to that. There are many dream cultures that have described experiences of what it looks like on different planets and on the moon, and when we actually looked through telescopes and did research, what scientists are finding is the images they have are identical to the images that the dreamers dreamed. Some of the elders would say, �Why would you need to do that? We could go up to the moon and tell you what it looked like. You didn't need to send a telescope.� Or look into the body in terms of microscopes. There are people that can go in and see things. I think that there is a lot of access to a lot of our world and worlds that are outside of our common perceptions that are available in the dream world. When you look at how our explorers traveled and people cut across mountain paths and survived and found ways to get across this country, I can't imagine that there wasn't some forecasting or some information that came to them that said �Turn right, turn left� for those that actually succeeded, that there wasn't some larger guidance that happened for people to get through dangerous waters. What I thought we would do in the last minute or two is to take a moment and work with a lucid dream image and to see what you notice as you do that. Probably many of you do this all the time and may not give it enough presence, but if you take a minute to kind of get comfortable in your chair and find your breath and let yourself kind of slow down into a quieter place, we'll see if we can work with the mythological image, or the real image, of horse. As you're in this quiet place, you might want to allow your intuitive self to come forward and see what kind of a landscape you're in. Do you find yourself in a forest or a desert? Do you find yourself near water? See if you can take yourself to a place in nature that calls to you. <Begins drumming.> Notice what the plants are around you, the time of day and time of season. If you look off into the clearing just to the right of your mind's eye, or just to the left of your mind's eye, there's an image that is beginning to come clear and it's of a horse. You might want to make a decision in this place for yourself, kind of an intuitive choice, about how you want to make contact with this horse, whether you want to call it to you or walk to it or whether you want to just gaze at it in the distance. You might notice the color of the horse or the size of the horse and see what it's doing. It might be quietly grazing, or it might be sniffing at the wind. It might be flicking its tail; it may be racing along the horizon. This is your horse for the moment. And notice as you make some kind of relationship with this horse, even if it's from a distance with your eyes, what you notice inside you, what you might be feeling, what comes up. How are you like this horse, and how are you very different from this horse, and why this horse at this time? And if this horse had something to offer to you, something to communicate to you through its body language, through the look in its eye, through how it approaches or moves away from you, what might be the message of this horse to you about something in your life right now? And then begin to create some kind of a closing with this horse; some way of parting, of letting the horse go or you moving away and returning just to the landscape as the horse disappears, and then coming back to this place and to this time. <Stops drumming.> Is there anything anybody wanted to say about their horse or their message? Maybe take a minute and � yeah? AUDIENCE: <Inaudible comment.> STEVENSON: A horse coming out of the mist and it's a unicorn. The message is magic really exists. This lucid dreaming happened in a field that we created this morning. That may be a message for you, and it may be a message for all of us. Did anybody else have a message that came or an image of your horse? AUDIENCE: <Inaudible comment.> STEVENSON: Okay, so not supposed to ride it; walk along side. AUDIENCE: <Inaudible comment.> STEVENSON: Starting to emerge. So it was an answer to kind of a therapy question � and maybe for all of us � there are times that we can really ride something, and there are times that we have to walk along side of it; we have to let it emerge, we have to be partners with it in that way. It really needs a shoulder-to-shoulder movement. In our times, we need to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with each other to move forward in a healthy way. How might we move forward in a more healthy way if we were able to walk next to one another? So that might be the larger message. Yes? AUDIENCE: <Inaudible comment.> STEVENSON: So something you were afraid of came and was sweet with you. The last part was � ? AUDIENCE : <Inaudible comment.> STEVENSON: So it might be that whole thing of non-attachment, that gifts come to us and they offer us some sweetness in the moment and we can't always hold onto that. And they often come when we least expect them and on their own terms leave, and that's really true with real horses. I work with my clients with horses. I have some brochures on the back about equine-assisted psychotherapy. It's interesting. I was working with a client the other day, and I was going to catch the horse. He knew I was coming to catch him and would have no part of letting me catch him. So we just kind of watched him run. Then we sat down to talk to her about something and we got lost in conversation, and the horse came over between the two of us and put his head over the two of us and stood there. Said, �Okay, I'm here. I'm ready.� Often when we chase our dreams, we grasp for things. We either over-extend or under-extend to meet them, but when we really just let ourselves be fully in the moment of who we are and just accept the moment as it is, these gifts just come to us. They're not meant for us to keep but meant for us to set free. These horses are all about freedom. We have these familiar images and guides with us, but when we really open and say, �Oh, I'm going to have to go to that same place,� the surprise is that there is really more available than we would dare ask for. So maybe the message to us is there is more available than we might suspect when we go to these sacred places. Thank you. It was a pleasure to meet you. <Applause> <End of presentation.> |