Finding the Phoenix

(from Workshop Four: The Magic of Dreams) Lucy: I had been looking forward to the two-day workshop on dreams since first starting the Phoenix course, and now – at Midsummer – it was finally here. Alex had sent an email asking that we each bring two dreams to explore during the workshop along with some suggestions to help us remember and record our dreams. Although I had started my dream journal months before in order to accommodate my increasingly vivid dreams, I found these instructions in the email helpful: (1) Think of your dreams the same way that you would watch a film. (2) Understand that dreams are: • Non-linear • Semiotic • Incorporate montage • The dream’s meaning lies in the subtext • Only you know the meaning of your dreams. (3) Before you go to sleep, tell yourself repeatedly that you will have an important dream which you will remember when you wake up. (4) Keep a cell phone (recorder) or pencil and paper by your bed so that you can record fragments and images from your dream as quickly as possible after you have dreamed it. (5) Even if all that you remember from your dream are random wisps, write them down. Go back to your notations when you wake up, you’ll discover that you remember more of the dream as you work with the images, and you’ll be able to fill in the blanks. (6) If you awaken directly from a dream try to stay in the same position that you were in while you were dreaming so that you can retain as much of the dream as possible on a cellular level as you work to remember it consciously. (7) When you record a dream in your dream journal focus on: • What was the narrative unfolding in the dream? • What images were present in the dream? It was a challenge to pick out two dreams to work with, but I finally decided to go with a recurring dream, and another which had elements of lucid dreaming in it. In the recurring dream I was walking alone on a lonely road through the foothills of some mountains wearing a black woolen cloak. I see a shape coming towards me over the green hills – a man on a black horse also wearing a cloak. He stops his horse when he reaches me, and helps me up so that I am sitting in front of him in the saddle. We gallop off toward the mountains to the East. In the nearly lucid dream I am running from pursuing soldiers through fields and briars. The ground is muddy and I am exhausted. As I pass the gate of a farm house, a young boy waves to me and calls out my name. I tell him that I am being chased and to tell the soldiers that he never saw me. With that, I suddenly turn into a wolf and race into the forest for safety. Both of these dreams struck me as being significant and therefore I was particularly keen on exploring them and their meaning on a deeper level. After reminding us about the importance of complete confidentiality during these workshops, and that we always had the option not to participate in any given exercise, Alex led us through a short, silent breathing-centered meditation. Afterward we began with a seminar/discussion about meaning making and dreams with plenty of opportunities for questions and answers. Handout 4.1: Making Meaning of Dreams Too frequently we tend to want to find the meaning of our dreams from an external source, be it a book or another person. Claiming our authority to determine the meaning of our own dreams and journeys is one of the most challenging hurdles to overcome as we seek self-discovery. And while knowledge of world mythologies and the meaning of archetypes and symbols embedded in them can provide a cross-cultural perspective to our own interpretations, they are merely suggestive adjuncts to a more transpersonal meaning. Our own personal interpretations – the phenomena and narrative in the dream filtered through our own unique meaning-making apparatus – are the only viable keys to the meaning of our dreams. Therefore it is beneficial to review your lenses from Workshop 1 (Biology, Personal History, Family, Genetics/Ethnicity, Culture, Shared Group History, and Spiritual Orientation) as well as reviewing the positive and negative experiences in your life in order to refresh your memory of your reality constructs. This is particularly important because dreams do not occur separately from the context of your life, but are frequently integral to it. Dreams can also contain messages and memories from ancestors that generate through inherited epigenetic modifications in our DNA (Carey, 2012; Moore, 2015) and this will be discussed in greater depth in the second part of the Phoenix program. That said, most of your dreams usually have some connection to the current context of your perception of your life through normal waking consciousness and are likely to be extensions of events and issues of your day. When you are doing dream work it is useful to make a note of the factors encountered in your daily life in your dream journal since they are likely to have some influence on the dream material that you encounter as you sleep. Therefore, it is useful to ask and write down the answers to the following questions: • What is my current biological state? Take into account hormonal fluctuations, physical cycles, ingestion of drugs or alcohol including OTC and prescription drugs, general state of health and digestion. (Yes – there are such things as pepperoni dreams.) • Was any part of my personal history triggered during the course of the day? • Is there an issue in my life? This could be an impending decision, a fear or a difficult person. • What did I happen to watch, read, see, or talk about before I went to bed? • What was on my mind when I went to bed?