The Sea of Dreams:
An Exploration of Hidden Depths
The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach – waiting for a gift from the sea.1
– Anne Morrow Lindbergh
I invite you to begin this exploration of your dreams by picturing yourself at the seaside. There, you walk barefoot along the shoreline, scanning the receding waters for shells. Many tantalising shell fragments catch your eye as the waters carry them back into the sea. Occasionally, a fragment, its colour, texture or shape, may tempt you to pick it up and examine it more closely. Most likely, you will find a shiny shard of a mussel, the broken fan of a clamshell or the inner spiral of a conch, its outer husk worn away or broken off by the motions of the waves. These fragments hold a certain beauty and may evoke memories of the past or a sense of wordless longing.
With luck, the waves will toss a shell, complete in its mathematical precision, at your feet, causing you to wonder at the beauty encasing the hollow emptiness where a sea creature once lived. Sometimes, as you search, an unseen wave may rush up unexpectedly, dousing you in cold, salty water. Yet, for seemingly no particular reason at all, searching for shells brings pleasure, putting you in touch with an intimate part of the immense, unknown sea that stretches out before you.
The shell in your hand holds a particular meaning for you. It is true that a knowledge of science may certainly enhance your appreciation of each shell, the intricacies of its form, the strength of its exoskeleton, the creature it housed, its role in the sea. Yet, you don’t need to be a collector to know that combing the beach for shells does you good, focuses your mind, and puts you in a more contemplative state.
A scientific appreciation of how the action of the waves generates negative ions that benefit our mood, activate our immune systems, stimulate our appetite and create brainwaves that bring us increased awareness will deepen your understanding of why you might like to walk by the seaside and look for shells. But, unless you go to the sea, take your shoes off, get your feet wet and breathe in the wave-filtered air, you won’t truly know what you’ve been missing. The same holds true of our dreams: science can tell us about our dream processes and purposes of dreaming, but you alone can relate the subjective reality of your dreams – what it felt like to be in your dream and what it might mean for you.
Research has shown that during sleep, dreams come with wave-like regularity across the sleep cycle. Yet, given that we spend nearly an astonishing third of our lifetime asleep and a total of six years dreaming, much about the purpose and benefits of dreams remains unchartered territory. The first study of the flickering eye movements indicative of dreaming associated with Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep took place in 1953.2 Subsequently, measurements of fluctuations in brain activity using the electroencephalogram (EEG) during REM sleep provided more evidence that dreaming occurs. But because the EEG confines the exploration of the nocturnal brain to electrical measurements close to the brain’s surface, the scientific exploration of the deeper neurological substrates of dreaming remained mostly inaccessible until the mid-1990s.
The evolution of computer technology has enabled researchers to penetrate ever deeper into the neurophysiology of the brain. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can map the hidden depths of the brain in both dreaming and dreamless states at ever-higher resolutions in three dimensions. Functional MRIs (fMRIs) reveal not only where brain activity occurs but also the brain processes involved in real time, recorded while the research subject dreams. Remarkably, computer algorithms used in conjunction with fMRI scans of brain activity during REM sleep can now be used to map dream imagery3 – if you dream of a seashell, the computer potentially recreates this.
Over recent decades, the scientific knowledge about dreams, especially the physiological and psychological benefits they offer, has deepened. Key findings from empirical studies on the purpose of dreams, particularly since the turn of the 21st century, have demonstrated that dreaming, both in REM and non-REM sleep, helps to promote and maintain neurological health across the lifespan of humans and other mammals.4 Significantly, as the neuroscientist Matthew Walker has pointed out, humans spend up to three times longer each night in REM dreaming than do primates, which appears to have given our species an evolutionary advantage.5
Dreams, it seems, generate scenarios wherein we can rehearse for waking life, enabling learning,6 insight,7 problem-solving and decision-making.8 They are thought to initiate the neural networks that transcribe experience into memories,9 balance our emotional life10 and help us to recognise and attune to emotions in others, particularly through the recognition of facial expressions.11 Dreams may inspire creativity12 and, importantly, lay down the foundations of self-awareness and reflection:13 conceptualisation, reasoning, intuition, insight and volition. Crucially, and for the benefit of the human species, dreams can potentially increase our capacity to master our more instinctual reactions of fear and anger and to express the deeply felt emotions essential for real relatedness and intimacy, including empathy.14 All these possibilities we will be exploring throughout this book.
Thanks to cross-disciplinary approaches to the study of dreams in neurology and psychology, sleep and consciousness studies, we have learned a great deal, yet further unexplored depths remain, particularly in the area of lucid dreams – dreams in which the dreamer becomes conscious that they dream.
Research first carried out in the late 1970s and early 1980s demonstrated the phenomenon of lucid dreaming.15 In these experiments, lucid dreamers successfully used pre-agreed eye movements during REM dream sleep to signal their lucidity – sending a sign from a previously hidden dimension of consciousness. Nevertheless, the world at large remained sceptical that lucid dreaming really existed until as late as 2009, when neuroimaging began to map the brain activity of the lucid state.16 Yet, the development of reflective awareness in dreams already had a long history within esoteric traditions. Tibetan Buddhism, for example, has developed a highly developed practice of ‘dream yoga’, refined over centuries,17 while Judaism, Christianity and Islam have also explored the revelatory aspects of reflective dreaming for spiritual purposes.18
Whereas neurological maps have revealed the features of the dream terrain, the qualities and emotional textures of the dreamscape exist in the infinitude of the imagination and the dreamer’s subjective experience of their ‘inner landscape of dreams’.19 Even though a computer may one day recreate your dream shell perfectly, only you can say what the shell means to you: that it might remind you of your first trip to the sea, the sound of the ocean, a powerful storm-tossed sea, or a calming turquoise-blue cove, and how that shell might put you in touch with qualities or feelings that you might have forgotten or not yet realised in yourself, a loved one, or the natural world. Only you can give an intimation of the dream shell’s personal value.
Dreams may yet be shown to be ‘the purest form of the imagination’.20 As such, alternative modes of knowing – analytical and experiential, biological and autobiographical, rational and poetic, left brain and right brain together – give us the most complete ‘imaging’ of the dream. In this book, these complementary perspectives interweave to help you engage with your dream life to enrich your waking life.
Why have I written this book on dreams? My answer, at heart, is simple – because of a dream! The dream came in my mid-twenties at a time when I had to decide whether or not I would take the opportunity to move to Europe from southern California near the Pacific Ocean, where I had grown up. I had completed my postgraduate studies and had been teaching for a few years. I deeply desired to go and do something practical and purposeful in the ‘real world’ that would benefit others.
During this time, the Berlin Wall dividing West and East Germany had fallen, leading to the opening of former Soviet Bloc countries to the West. The United States Peace Corps was recruiting volunteers with postgraduate degrees to set up teacher training colleges for foreign-language teachers in Eastern Europe. I applied and was offered the chance to go to Poland. Suddenly confronted with choosing whether to stay in the States or to move abroad, I was feeling rather despondent at the thought of leaving my family. I took a long walk along the foothills, where I stopped to take inspiration from a view of the blue Pacific, shining in the distance, and to pray for dream guidance – the first time I had asked for this for myself. (As a child, I knew from biblical stories that people can obtain guidance from a dream, but it had never occurred to me that such requests could apply to ordinary people like me.)
That night, in my dream, I found myself walking at the base of the California foothills along the coast, where I wandered through crowded carnival grounds, feeling alone. I longed for a friend to join me. The crowds jostled around me, pushing me out towards the hills, where a man approached me saying, ‘I’ve heard you’ve been looking for a friend.’ His gentleness reassured me, and I felt that I could trust this stranger whose blond wavy hair touched the shoulders of his royal-blue poet’s blouse. His fine features and form radiated beauty.
As we walked in the hills, we communicated without words. The sea-washed breeze cooled us. I asked him his name and he answered, ‘Gabriel.’ I turned to face him and said, ‘You know that name means “child of God”?’ He smiled and said, ‘I know.’
We walked together for a long time. Then he invited me home to meet his family. There, his elderly parents and three sisters greeted me warmly. A gentle fire burned in the hearth. They fed me freshly baked bread and fresh milk. As I ate, the meal seemed to make me whole and gave me new life. After supper, Gabriel told me that we would be taking a journey into the night. Since childhood, I had been terribly afraid of the dark, but now, with Gabriel, the darkness felt friendly and safe. I got into his invisible ‘car’ and together we moved into the velvety blackness at an incredible speed. Then I awoke.
This dream held great import for me because, at the dream’s end, I understood ‘Gabriel’ to be an angelic presence. In the Christian tradition in which I was raised, Gabriel heralded a clear divine message. Although the Gabriel of my dream did not signpost the direction I should take, his loving presence nonetheless imparted an abiding sense of inner guidance, one that has accompanied me throughout my life.
At the time, I intuited the dream as indicating that I had the inner strength needed to take a leap of faith into the unknown and to make the move to Poland, that I wasn’t alone and didn’t need to feel afraid. Now, some 30 years later, I recognise even more importantly that such dreams remind us that we ‘belong to more than ourselves’.21 They intimate that we are loved, not for what we know, possess or do, but simply for who we are as ‘children’ of a star-studded universe, alive with ‘more-than-human-consciousness’.22
Given my Christian upbringing and my personal exploration of other wisdom traditions, I use words such as ‘God’, ‘the numinous’, ‘the Mystery’, ‘a Divine Presence’, ‘the Beloved’, ‘the Essence’, ‘a Higher Wisdom’ and ‘the transpersonal’ when referring to this all-encompassing consciousness. Such consciousness deeply moves us and broadens our appreciation of life, awakening our minds and hearts to the animating principle that moves soulfully through all of creation in its abundance of form. Such appreciation in its many different manifestations expresses our human spiritual nature.
The root of the word ‘spirit’ is found in such words as ‘respire’ and ‘inspire’, having to do with the intake of breath that gives us life. For each of us, what makes us fully present to life is unique. It might be observing a religious ritual or taking a walk by the sea. At the same time, I have learned from my own experience and that of my clients’ that dreams can serve this valuable purpose when we become attentive to them.
Prior to my ‘Gabriel’ dream, I could never have foreseen that turning to my dreams for guidance would lead me from my country of origin, where I had studied literature and language, to Europe, where I would do research in the Psychology of Religion and go on to train as a psychotherapist specialising in dreams. Nor could I have imagined that my dreams would help me to direct educational programmes, a charitable counselling service, and to co-found the Dream Research Institute (DRI) in London – a rare place where researchers study how dreams influence the wellbeing of mind, body and spirit.23
Among our projects, the DRI has undertaken research on how dreamwork supports the emotional wellbeing of patients suffering from autoimmune disease;24 how therapeutic dream re-entry facilitates positive changes in mental wellbeing long-term;25 how dream guidance facilitates creative development over time;26 and how the appearance of light, symmetry27 and colour in dreams,28 as well as directional movement in the lucid dreaming space,29 promotes therapeutic processes – topics that this book covers. In a later chapter, I describe how my numerous lucid dreams led me to explore what happens when the lucid dreamer takes a receptive attitude in lucidity rather than attempting to ‘control’ the dream, a therapeutic process I have called ‘Lucid Surrender’.30
Many learned books on dreams already exist. Rather than elaborating on dreams from a purely theoretical angle, my approach has been to contextualise dreams within the natural world and our daily lives. I am grateful to the many people who have given consent to have their dreams included in this book – colleagues, friends, clients, students and contributors from archived collections. The dreamers and their dreams have been anonymised for reasons of confidentiality. Where I present a full case illustration or more extensive reflections on a dream and its therapeutic value, I have given the dreamer a pseudonym.
Please remember that no matter what I may have to say about a dream, nothing has more authenticity than the dream itself. Only the dreamer can tell us what happened in a dream’s depths and what it felt like to be there. We cannot separate the dream from the reality of the person who dreamed it, particularly as a dream comes fully alive through how it changes both the dreamer and waking life.31 Further, a dream when shared can change others too.
With this in mind, I have selected sample dreams that clearly foreground a particular feature of dreams. These first-hand accounts speak to our individual and collective experience as human beings and have been gleaned from my many years of working with people and their dreams. Wherever possible, I have included the dreamer’s own understanding of the dream’s intent, and the accompanying reflections which appear in quotations have been written by the dreamers themselves. However, I also invite you, the reader, to approach each dream account as if it were your own.
Dreams, when viewed from a detached stance, lose their vitality. And so, throughout this book, I invite you to imaginatively interact with the sample dreams as we reflect on each in turn. However, if you are feeling emotionally unstable or have a been diagnosed with a mental illness, then I would recommend considering each dream or visual exercise as an observer, rather than as a direct participant. Doing so will help give you distance from the dream’s emotional content. You can also seek out a therapist who works with dreams to provide extra support and guidance.32
In my presentation of dream material, I have endeavoured to be true to the dreams from the ‘inside-out’ in order to help us understand what it feels like to enter into relationship with our dreams. This has required the personal courage to share more intimately of my own experience. I decided to include my own dreams to show how I, too, had to learn to trust my dreams, listen to them and appreciate how they heal and guide. My learning helps to point the way; your dreams give you the opportunity to learn from your own experience.
This book draws on both the science and art of dreaming, with a special focus on the therapeutic benefits of dreams, their capacity to renew us, reveal our nature and restore balance to our lives. For this we also need an understanding of our human psychology and spirituality. While it is good to know about the science of dreaming, the facts of brain circuitry alone can never explain the revelatory nature of a dream and what we can learn as we contemplate it. Nor can any understanding be complete, for, unlike the sea, dreams have infinite depth.
The purpose of this book is not only to impart a deeper understanding of dreams but also to engage you in learning to trust your dreams and to respond to the guidance dreams bring to waking life. Thus, the style, theme, content and structure of the chapters interweave to amplify a particular element of the dream experience. Because of this, I would read the text from start to finish. Readers who follow the book’s natural progression, rather than dipping into chapters that hold particular interest, will find that each chapter, while complete in and of itself, contributes to a foundational understanding for what follows.
This chapter and chapters Two and Three introduce knowledge about the study and nature of sleep and dreams, guiding the reader to become more attentive to the reciprocity between dreams and life. Chapters Four, Five, and Six direct the attention to underlying principles that dreams share with the natural world and the ways these reflect both human and more-than-human consciousness. Chapters Eight, Nine and Ten then consider the nature of presence, will and awareness – including self-awareness and transpersonal awareness – within dreams. These latter chapters bring ideas introduced and attitudes cultivated in previous chapters to fruition.
Each chapter includes references to scientific research, philosophy, religious traditions, the creative arts and alchemical teachings. Chapter notes, while not required reading, provide further details and extensive resources – a veritable dream library – for those who have an area of interest they would like to have evidenced or deepened. In instances where I provide examples of research in a particular field, I have selected one or two key studies of especial relevance and accessibility.
As this book will show, dreams, whether felt to be positive or negative, memorable or inconsequential, fragmentary or complete, serve to connect us to a transformative energy that, like the power of the sea when harnessed, can change our lives and the world around us. Even as we sleep, the brain’s intricate neurology connects us to a mysterious ‘sea of dreams’ – vast ‘domains of potentiality’.33
While much of the good our dreams do us happens without our full awareness, to benefit fully from our dreams, we need to bring our attention to them – no matter whether we recall a dream as a whole or only in wisps – before the dream recedes into the forgetfulness of sleep or the distractions of waking life. We need to wake up to our dreams!
Listen to your own dreams and those in this book to decide for yourself. Be aware that by reading these dreams and learning about the art and science shaping them, your perspective on your dream life and waking life will change, while your relationship to your dreams – and thus to yourself – deepens. By choosing this book, you have already taken the first step. Now, you need only to pause, pick up the dreams like shells in your hand, turn each one over in your mind and reflect on them with me as we experience the transformative power they hold.