The secret side of things is open to us.
The time of innocence is gone.
The age of dreaming has come.
Ben Okri
Do you remember your dreams? If you do, or if you don't, does it matter? Is there a way in which your dreams might make a difference to those around you, and to the world you live in? What does it mean to live a dream? These are questions I am asking myself.
Dream recall is a relatively recent experience for me, and coincided with my introduction to aquatic bodywork around the millennium. Awake-dreaming in the water while receiving this buoyant form of movement therapy, seemed to give access to my night dreaming world as well.
Water, I found, could trigger an altered state of consciousness in which as a willing receiver I was flooded with images, perceptions, feelings, and sensations that made possible profound shifts in my being. I recorded these and encouraged my clients to do the same.
Water and the Soul
In mythology, water has been associated with the unconscious. Archetypal psychologist, Jung said that when the spirit becomes heavy it turns to water; that the way of the soul leads to water. And one of my favorite poets of soul Mary Oliver concludes:
it comes and goes like wind over water.
Some of us are more watery, more dreamy, more soulful perhaps than others, and many of the ancient healing methods considered the contribution of this archetypal element to an individual's make-up. My friend Jonathan DeVierville considers that 'Water is to the Body, as Dreams are to the Soul'.
Jung's theory, says Barbara Bowen, 'suggests that our psyches are born connected to a deeper collective "ocean" of awareness from which our personal dreams flow. Like tributaries, dreams deliver ancient motifs that play a mysterious role in humanity's evolution of consciousness. ...
'No matter how clarified, puzzling or outlandish their language may be, our dreams are trying to tell us something. They often require us to dwell for a time within ambiguities, to bathe in cool pools of uncertainty, before we profess to know what they have in mind.'
Jungian psychotherapist, Arnold Mindell, described the 'dreambody', the part of us that does not conform to collective materialistic definitions, but hovers somewhere between physical sensation and mythic visualization when we surrender to the water. He wrote:
Exploring dreams
I came to think of my warm water pool as a portal to the unconscious or the dreamtime where my dreambody revealed herself. In the past year, personal circumstances kept me from my pool haven. But interestingly, seven significant night dreams have offered me powerful water imagery.
Four water-associated dreams in the previous years, and since I encountered aquatic bodywork, have had aspects to them which make them seem very significant parts of my personal mythology and perhaps also of the role I am playing out in this lifetime with respect to others.
I've been exploring different ways to relate to these dreams and to weave them into the fabric and understanding of my everyday life. My partner Joe, whose own work, Astropoetics, inspires a creative interface between personal imagery and astrological cycles, is my fellow explorer.
As we progress with these studies, there will I hope be much more to share that is useful to others on this soul journey. Meanwhile, on this weblog I will be writing about some of the personal insights gained so far. The vulnerability inherent in this does call for some courage.
Dreams seem to me to be Neptunian creatures of the deep and easily mistaken. They cannot be approached head on but they ought to be attended to respectfully, otherwise they turn from shy messengers into fearsome monsters.
In the years since I began aquatic bodywork, I have faced a few monsters myself, and cannot say that this is an easy path. This is what led me to consider the shamanic implications of this work when conducted in a manner that resembles journeying, diving below the surface of things (see below for a link to more on this).
To benefit from our night dreams, we must allow that they have valuable messages to convey to us; it also seems essential to adopt the ritual of setting the intention to remember them and to have the discipline consistently to record whatever we recall without judgment.
In the same way, to dive deep into the self through aquatic bodywork, seems to require an open attitude and commitment to the process as it unfolds. As far as I know, no-one has seriously explored (and recorded) the dream world made more accessible by water.
Inspired by a workshop in 2001 with Jungian trained Dr J.P. DeVierville, I began to see how dreams and water might be combined in a powerful exploration of both personal healing and human collective consciousness.
In early civilizations, numinous dreams, archetypal expressions of the collective unconscious were often considered to be of cultural significance. I've written elsewhere about the central role dreams played in the healing conducted at Asclepian temples of ancient Greece.
As human societies developed, writes Anthony Steven, there has been a decline in the incidence of collective dreams with the power to transform a people, and they have been replaced by dreams of purely personal relevance.
Personal dreams can alter the life of the dreamer, and it has been suggested that someone who does not dream, who cannot transform in some way their fears and hopes into significant and meaningful images, becomes sick.
In his book Private Myths: Dreams and Dreaming, Steven also suggests '... likewise, that a society which has lost its ability to respond to the collective dream or myth is unable to heal itself or fulfill its need for the spiritual.'
The name 'social dreaming' has been given to this concept and it is something that I believe may help us beyond the impasse that our materialistic and individualistic culture has brought us to. The idea that we can dream for and with each other for the greater good is an inspiring one.
This idea is also inherent in the Native American Vision Quest which was not so much intended as a personal quest but as a quest on behalf of one's people. Developing sufficient clarity to dream or vision in this way without the interference of ego must surely be the first challenge.
Bringing back a good dream
The value of sharing dreams with others in safe and supportive space is something that I have witnessed. I have wondered how this might be translated into action or something of wider affect. Stories or artworks created from dream sources are an indirect way. Living the dream is another.
Visionary Ivan Illich wrote a stunning book as a result of advice he was asked to give to the city of Dallas about their water usage. In it he shows how myths provide us with collective knowledge, and how seeking below the surface of things should be an important part of our decision-making.
Referencing the Titan Muse, Mnemosyne (the personification of memory in Greek mythology), Illich wrote about the ways in which ancestral knowledge comes to us through the kind of remembering that water seems to engender, whether we sit beside it or float in it, so long as we respect it:
'Under the protection of Mnemosyne, he may recollect the residues that have sunk into her bosom by drinking from her waters. When he returns from his journey, from his dream or vision, he can tell what he has drawn from this source'.
Perhaps, if we were able to do this kind of collective dreaming and healing again, we could move our species off the path of destruction and forgetfulness on which we now appear to be. Perhaps, if we were to see water as the medium of such dreams, we would revere it again.
Here is the rest of Ben Okri's fine poem with which this posting began:
We who live through turbulent mysteries
Do not know that a whole way is passing.
We do not know the things to come.
We go on living as if history is a dream.
The miracle is that we go on
Living and loving as best we can,
In this enigma of reality.
1980-1998 London, Ben Okri from Infinite Riches
Related articles and posts:
Trance, Dreaming and Aquatic Bodywork
Neptune has a heart (a poem by Sulis)
For more on shamanic aspects, see my article, 'Dancing in Healing Waters' Shamans Drum Magazine (issue 62, 2002, pp. 17-27).
