Dreams, Trees and Their Roots
in the Imaginal Mind:
Transforming Waking Life
The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn, the bird waits in the egg, and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities.1
– James Allen
Do we dream or is there a dream dreaming us? In response to this question, I have chosen trees – what we know about them from the sciences, philosophy, religious traditions, alchemy and the arts – to open the way to an experience of the creative imagination expressed through dreams, what I shall refer to as the Imaginal Mind. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein asks, ‘Can someone teach me that I see a tree? And what is a tree? And what is seeing?’2 We can ask the same questions of dreams as we consider how to see our dreams anew. Learning to become attentive to the Imaginal Mind – in which the intellect and sense perception meet – deepens our understanding of dreams and life. The Imaginal Mind invites us to enter into relationship with Nature – rather than observing it at a distance, as an object outside of us, a ‘thing’ apart.
To give you an example of what I mean, I ask you to picture a tree in your mind’s eye. It may be an actual tree that you are familiar with, one on whose branches you climbed on or played under as a child, or one in whose shade you rested in as an adult. Alternatively, you can choose whatever tree comes to mind – a willow bent tenderly towards a river; an apple tree bearing humble gifts; a weathered oak embracing the sky; a majestic redwood whose tip pierces the highest heavens. As you look at the tree, take a deep breath and exhale, then give yourself a moment to experience the tree’s scent, its touch and texture, the coolness of its shadow, the colour of its leaves. With each exhalation, focus on the qualities the tree holds for you – its grace, simplicity, strength, determination. With your in-breath, draw those qualities deeply into yourself.
Now imagine yourself stepping into the tree and taking on its form – your feet rooted in the ground, your body extended upward as a trunk, your arms branched out, your thoughts unfurled like leaves, sensitive to your environment. How does it feel to become a wakeful tree? How does your viewpoint change? When you are ready, imagine stepping out of the tree and looking at it afresh.
By re-imagining the tree in this way, you may have become more aware of the tree’s rootedness in time and place, the uniqueness of its shape, its symbiotic relationship to its environment or possibly the threats the environment posed. Perhaps the tree stood alone and felt self-sufficient, or maybe desired companionship. Perhaps it aimed to reach higher than the trees around it or felt unprotected, battered by recent storms. Did the tree seem healthy or in need of water and light? Did you see the tree with new eyes? Whatever you sensed in the tree, before you read on, take a moment to consider how that tree relates to your own concerns, hopes and dreams, how becoming the tree can heighten the way you feel about yourself, your life – and trees!
A waking-life visualisation, such as our reflections on a tree, enables us to access the liminal state of dream-like consciousness. The word ‘liminal’ derives from the Latin limen, associated with a threshold such as a doorsill or windowsill, delineating where worlds appear to touch – the shoreline, where the sea and land meet; dawn and dusk poised between day and night; moments between sleep and waking; transitions of life and death. When we reflect on a dream or re-enter it imaginatively, we re-engage with the consciousness animating it. Moving in and out of such liminality through imagery comes more naturally to some of us than others, but it can be learned with guidance.3
As we enter this liminal state mindfully, what we normally perceive as inanimate objects may take on a life of their own. We imagine ourselves as a tree and we ourselves are re-imagined. In his moving book I and Thou,4 the philosopher Martin Buber observes that when we consider a tree we can look at it as an object to be classified, owned or used, or we can enter into relationship with the tree in a gestalt awareness of the tree’s ‘form and structure, its colours and chemical composition, its intercourse with the elements and the stars...’5 Through mutual relation, something we generally think of as inanimate, or a person we may have depersonalised, becomes a ‘Thou’ to which we relate, rather than an ‘It’ that we simply objectify, unaware of our deep-rooted interconnectedness. The same applies to our dreams.
Trees have literal roots, whereas our human ‘roots’ are metaphorical, yet they intertwine in the Imaginal Mind. Both need nourishment, as the following dream, had at a time when I felt creatively ‘blocked’, suggests:
I dream of a tree planted in a large wooden tub on the street where I grew up. The tree, of a good size, looks rather beleaguered and the soil dry. The container too small. A woman looks on and comments on how the tree needs a great deal of water. But she has poured something dark on it. ‘What’s that?’ I wonder. ‘Did you pour cola on it?’ ‘Yes,’ she replies, ‘the caffeine and sugar will wake it up.’ I strongly disagree with this as I can see the soil is dry and needs turning. I get a bucket of water and pour it into the container. Then, I turn the wet soil over with a trowel. While doing this, I am surprised to notice some clothes and linen tangled among the tree’s roots. Up come objects from my past, all associated with a difficult time in my life. I wonder that the tree could live with its roots blocked by these things. But most of all, I sense the tree’s gratitude at having the soil watered, turned and cleared. I realise that I now need to find a more spacious place to plant the tree so that it can continue to grow.
The dream indicated to me that I was literally drinking too much caffeine and had become dehydrated! But when I dream of a need for water, this also suggests to me a need for a more soulful, less pragmatic, ‘living-waters’ perspective – time to rest, reflect and recharge. Through the dream, I was reminded that, earlier in the day, I had felt rather sorry for the trees planted in a stand on a London pavilion, but, even so, had thoughtlessly poured my leftover tea into the planter as there was nowhere else to empty it. Immediately, I winced at the memory, aware that I had not helped the tree at all! The dream reflected my own thoughtless behaviour. I hadn’t given the tree or myself what was needed.
The dream tree also mirrored my personal need to have good deep soil in which to put down roots. Reflecting on the dream imagery, I realised that some leftover thoughts from the past limited the tree’s growth as well as my own. As a whole, the dream presented me with a psychological task: to ‘clear out’ old ways of thinking about the past and myself in order to make space for new, creative growth in fresh soil. Just as I had sensed the dream tree’s gratitude for being tended to, I, too, could be grateful for the dream’s guidance.
When we reflect on our dreams using our creative imagination, elements of our personal history and psychology, woven into the dream imagery, come alive with the meaning and mutuality of relationship, opening the door to the Imaginal World, the Mundus Imaginalis, of dreams.6 The French philosopher Henry Corbin proposed this term to refer to a dimension of experience described by Islamic mystics as the ‘alam-al-mithal, the World of the Imagination, entered in dreams. This ‘world’ arises from the interaction of our inner awareness with our human physicality, creating a bridge between our subjective reality and the ‘objective’ world. The Imaginal World of our dreams, in contrast to how we use imagination in the waking state, has a heightened reality all its own, yet speaks directly to our lived experience.7
Studies in the area of perception and insight hint at why dreams may feel even more real than the merely imaginary. In the first instance, to understand how visual perception works in dreams, researchers compared the way the eye moves during REM dreaming as it follows an object in a lucid dream with how the eye moves in an imagined scenario in waking life. In the physical world, when we visually follow an object, such as a leaf blowing in the wind, our eyes move in a smooth movement, but when we simply imagine the same sequence when awake, the eyes move in tiny, saccadic jerks. The results suggest that in REM dreaming the eye moves as it does when tracking objects in the waking world,8 contributing to an experience of a ‘world’ we visually perceive as ‘real’.
In the second instance, to investigate claims that the consideration of dreams results in personal insights, researchers compared the power of insights gained from dream recall versus the recollection of a waking-life event. The research indicated that when people consider a recent dream in a therapeutic process, they gain more personal insights than when they reflect on a recent event from waking life in a similarly therapeutic context.9 These findings could lend credence to the idea that the increase of activity in areas of the brain associated with the emotions during REM dreaming, coupled with the decrease of sensory input, gives dream content more immediacy than merely imagined or recalled events.
As part of a study on visual imagery in dreams by sleep researcher Helder Bértolo, volunteers were asked to draw scenes from their dreams. One participant sketched what he had seen: a beach where two children played in the sand sheltered from the sun by a palm tree, while gulls flew overhead and a boat passed in the distance. This scene might seem unremarkable until we learn that the dreamer had been congenitally blind since birth. This prompted Bértolo to question how it could be possible to have such visual imagery without visual perception.10 While recognising that the blind draw on other sensory input to create mental representations, Bértolo wondered whether the level of detail of the pictorial representations signified a visual experience as well as spatial properties.
According to subsequent research, because those born blind lack the visual input needed to create visual memories, they have dreams that mostly feature the senses of sound, touch, smell and taste.11 However, dream-based depictions drawn by the congenitally blind raise fundamental questions about the nature of visual perception without visual input and how we ‘see’ in a dream. A person born blind may experience themselves as ‘seeing’ in a dream – as one participant in Bértolo’s study testified, he felt reluctant to tell people that he could see in dreams because he had previously been told that he ‘didn’t see things, he just felt them’.12
Further research has confirmed that the dreams of the blind and sighted primarily share similar types of emotional and thematic content.13 It would appear that both the blind and the sighted share ‘inner sight’, perceived by the ‘eye’ of the creative imagination in dreams. The feeling-toned, relational quality of the Imaginal Mind draws on forms of knowing that are deeper than the mere products of sense perception. As we consider the nature of dreams, we will, as Buber advised, ‘keep to the meaning of the relation’, remembering that in dreams, as in waking life, ‘relation is mutual’.14
Rather than thinking of dream scenarios as bizarre because they bend our ordinary experience of space-time and befuddle our expectations, we can appreciate how our dreams challenge us to think and to feel ‘outside the box’. We can do so by attending to our right brain’s metaphoric and associative qualities, characteristic of the intuitive, creative mind, rather than the left brain’s more linear and rational approach.
The neuroscientist and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist calls ‘the right-brain’s understanding of the world’ one that arises from ‘empathy and intersubjectivity as the ground of consciousness’. He notes that when we look at the world with a right-brain perspective, we hold an awareness of ‘the importance of an open, patient attention to the world, as opposed to a wilful, grasping attention’.15 Describing the ‘fundamentally asymmetrical’ differences between how the brain’s right and left hemispheres perceive the world, he observes, ‘These are not different ways of thinking about the world: they are different ways of being in the world.’16 This statement holds just as true for dreams.
Since the right brain becomes more active during dreaming,17 along with areas of the brain associated with the processing of emotions, it follows that we can usefully learn to access a more right-brain way of being by re-engaging with our dream-feelings through dreamwork. Sigmund Freud, in his classic work The Interpretation of Dreams, refers to dream images as ‘dream-thoughts’.18 I prefer to use the term dream-feelings to highlight our emotional response to dream imagery.
On the subject of dream imagery, Joseph Campbell has explained: ‘In dreams things are not as single, simple, and separate as they seem, the logic of Aristotle fails, and what is not-A may indeed be A.’19 A similarly metaphoric way of thinking enabled Einstein to imagine travelling along a beam of light, relativise time in a space-bound elevator, and envision the fabric of space-time curved like a trampoline weighed down with a bowling ball.20 When Einstein was asked if he trusted more to his imagination than knowledge, he answered: ‘I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.’21 Such intuitive knowing has significant implications not only for how we view our dreams (and trees) but also for how we share the earth with them and with each another. For, as the psychologist James Hillman reminds us, the ‘imagination is not merely a human faculty but an activity of soul to which the human imagination bears witness.’22
Long before the recognition of the ‘observer effect’ in quantum physics, in which the mere presence of an observer changes the experimental outcome, alchemists of old recognised the influence of their state of mind upon the objects of investigation. In their pursuit of gold – a quest both material and spiritual, and one that would grant immortality – alchemists explored the intersection between the human imagination and the world of matter. The seminal alchemical text the Emerald Tablet, or the Tabula Smaragdina, attributed to the legendary Hermes Trismegistus, enigmatically states: ‘What is above is like what is below, and what is below is like that which is above.’23
This verse expresses the alchemical axiom of correspondences between subjective experience and objective ‘reality’. For the alchemists, the spiritual world literally enlivens the material world, the human capacity for creative imagination mirroring that of the Supreme Creator’s divine or ‘theophanic’ imagination.24 The alchemist Heinrich Khunrath boldly claimed: ‘He who denies true dreams, speaks in a dream.’25 Dream revelations, according to Khunrath, can reveal the secrets of the created universe. Experiential knowing garnered from the Imaginal Mind gives insights and a deep reflective awareness in dreams no less than life.
In a modern society heavily focused on productivity and outcome measures, the liminal state has struggled to maintain its historical status as an important means of healing body, heart and mind. Yet this imaginative faculty, with roots deep in our shared humanity, remains essential to our wellbeing. For example, during the visualisation of your tree, had you been connected to a HeartMath device that monitors your heart rate variability, you would most likely find that as your breath slowed and deepened, your heart rhythm became more ‘coherent’.
Your heart sends these signals to your brain through nerves, hormones and, importantly, its biomagnetic field (an estimated 5,000 times stronger than the brain’s).26 These impulses in turn synchronise or ‘entrain’ your brainwaves with your heart’s rhythm,27 quieting your thoughts and lowering cell-damaging levels of stress-induced cortisol and oxidants. Such research lends support to Blaise Pascal’s insight made over 400 years ago that ‘the heart has its reasons which reason does not know.’28
The researchers who developed HeartMath have described the heart’s intelligence this way:
... the intelligent flow of awareness and insight that we experience once the mind and emotions are brought into balance and coherence through a self-initiated process. This form of intelligence is experienced as direct, intuitive knowing that manifests in thoughts and emotions that are beneficial for ourselves and others.29
The heart/brain connection helps us find solutions where the logical mind has reached a dead end,30 including through the ‘direct, intuitive knowing’, the ‘heart intelligence’ gained when we slow down and breathe deeply, taking time in our daily life to work imaginatively with our dreams and the feelings they arouse.
Additional research has shown that in sleep, our breathing gradually slows up to 10 per cent over a period of several hours, whereas in meditation, the rate decreases by 20 to 40 per cent in few minutes.31 Such changes in breathing rate could be one reason that when a person meditatively does a visualisation or reflects on a dream, it can feel as if they are dreamed rather than dreaming.
The liminality between dreams and waking life is revealed in a biblical dream from nearly 3,000 years ago, recounted by an ancient king of Babylon. The dream puzzled the king, so he asked for his court magicians to discern its meaning:
Here is my dream; interpret it for me. These are the visions I saw while lying in bed: I looked, and there before me stood a tree in the middle of the land. Its height was enormous. The tree grew large and strong and its top touched the sky; it was visible to the ends of the earth. Its leaves were beautiful, its fruit abundant, and on it was food for all. Under it the wild animals found shelter, and the birds lived in its branches; from it every creature was fed...
I looked, and there before me was a holy one, a messenger, coming down from heaven. He called in a loud voice: ‘Cut down the tree and trim off its branches; strip off its leaves and scatter its fruit. Let the animals flee from under it and the birds from its branches. But let the stump and its roots, bound with iron and bronze, remain in the ground, in the grass of the field.
Let him be drenched with the dew of heaven, and let him live with the animals among the plants of the earth. Let his mind be changed from that of a man and let him be given the mind of an animal, till seven times pass by for him.32
Let us take a moment to consider the tree itself, radiant with life, and then imagine it struck down, reduced to a stump bound in metal. What kind of outside forces strike down trees? The ‘holy one’ in the dream gives no reason for the destruction, but, viewed from the perspective of this day and age, we can reflect on the human forces that have driven the destruction of Earth’s natural environment and consider how these might relate to our individual experience.
In this biblical account, the prophet Daniel tells the king that the dream has come to reveal the thoughts of his heart.33 He then gives the king a remarkably psychological interpretation – ‘Your Majesty, you are that tree!’ – thereby warning the king to be less prideful, to be kind to those he had oppressed and to acknowledge his dependence on a power greater than his own.34 The king does not follow the advice and a year later loses his reason, spending seven years living in the fields, before regaining his health and kingdom. Traditionally, the king is seen to suffer because of his pride. However, in the 21st century, the dream also reminds us of the imbalances that cause destruction to individuals and the environment when humanity forgets that the mind is meant to serve the ‘heart’.
Conversely, in our waking life, as in dreams, a tree, when perceived through the lens of the Imaginal Mind, can reflect something to us of our individual psyche, inviting us to connect our innermost self with the external world. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke takes up this theme:
... Oh, I who long to grow,
I look outside, and within me grows the tree.35
Now, let me introduce you to a secluded grove on Hampstead Heath in London where there stands the ‘Hollow Tree’. She has grown up at the end of a line of seven beech trees seeded in the late 1800s. Her hollow trunk is large enough to hold a few adults. To have a hollow of this size, she must have suffered a major wounding that exposed her heartwood. Yet she survived.
I have visited this tree during times of upheaval and exhaustion in my life. When in the tree’s hollow, I press my open palms upon the swirls of time-smoothed ridges in her belly and instantly feel safe, soothed, re-energised, encompassed in a being whose lifespan will extend for generations beyond my own. The beauty of her hollow brings home the truth that wisdom is the fruit of suffering. From her empty womb comes new life, a feeling of rebirth. Now that I live too distant to visit the Hollow Tree regularly, a photo in my study reminds me of her. I simply recall her presence, and I feel better. In an embodied way, this tree centres me. In my mind and dreams, I often return to her. Her creative stillness speaks to me of my deep need for contemplation and creation. Her hollowness reminds me of my longings to have a child and the many other ways we bring life into the world out of emptiness.
The author Richard Powers, in his novel The Overstory, explores how trees shape our environments as active protagonists in our lives, possessing intelligence and personhood. Reflecting on the generosity and bounty of trees, especially the Douglas fir, whose roots bequeath its remaining store of nutrients with other trees before it dies, the narrator calls our arboreal cousins ‘giving trees’.36 A finely tuned individuality harmonises each tree into an interdependent system that far outreaches their individual limits.
Likewise, in the delightful book The Hidden Life of Trees, to which this book’s title is an affectionate allusion, the forester Peter Wohlleben shares the discovery of a ‘wood wide web’. This ‘web’, comprised of tree roots interwoven with fungi that can network an entire woodland, enables trees to transmit information about pests, dangers and food supplies.37 More than this, older trees can support younger ones, and trees of different species help care for one another by sharing nutrients.38 Through root systems that stretch well beyond their crown, trees can be said both to communicate and extend their social connections much as we do through the interconnectivity of our technology. Scientists in Finland and Hungary have found that trees also ‘sleep’.39 We might well wonder, ‘Do trees dream too?’
Keeping in mind the maxim ‘As above, so below’, such earthly imagery serves as an apt analogy for the Jungian understanding of dreams as tapping into a collective unconscious psyche. Every night, our dreams mend and shape us, and, in turn, shape us all. While we sleep, our dreams breathe into us, transforming us in countless ways people long ago knew – ways that we, in our modern world, need to relearn. In dreams, we experience the properties of the Imaginal Mind, extending our range of thinking, feeling and action to include a realm of possibility that goes beyond the mind as generally perceived. As Jung noted, ‘Everything that acts [on us] is actual.’40
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity tells us that as space expands balloon-like around us, the centre of the universe coalesces around our individual perception; wherever we are is ‘here’, the centre – a viewpoint that, if taken to an extreme, can result in a dangerously egocentric focus. At the same time, as Einstein observed, the notion that we are separate from one another, and from the universe, comprises an ‘optical delusion’.41 This idea appears in a medieval teaching, most likely from Rabbinical sources, that describes ‘God’ as a being whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere.
Jung proclaims a similar message as regards dreams: ‘All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night.’42 In a like manner, a dream reconsidered by the light of our creative imagination can give us the sense of being centred in ourselves and yet part of the entire universe. The Jungian analyst Edward Edinger shares one such dream had by a woman who, after many years of personal struggle and therapy, overcame her bitterness through acceptance:
I see a tree which had been struck by lightning. However, it seemed that it had not been destroyed completely, but that something of the electric power had gone through the tree and into its surroundings where it causes unusual fertility.43
Such dreams remind us that for all that we know about the universe, fundamental attributes such as space, time, light, consciousness, dreams, and even trees, remain mysterious to us.
The term ‘Dreamtime’, originally coined by ethnographer Francis Gillen,44 is used to describe the Aboriginal people’s sense of time as an eternal ‘everywhere’, a continuum in which the past lives in the present through relationship to the ancestors.45 In this tradition, through dreams and ceremonies, Dreamtime can be accessed and lived. This perception of time offers what Mircea Eliade, a historian of religion, describes as a ‘mode of being in the world’, a ‘sacred history’ out of which humanity emerges.46 In the words of one Kalahari Bushman, ‘There is a dream dreaming us.’47 Among the indigenous peoples of Australia we can find the belief that, prior to a child’s conception, the spirit-child must appear to a parent in a dream.48 Dreams, in a very tangible way, become ‘the seedlings of realities’.49
In the Aboriginal cosmology of ‘The Dreaming’,50 features of the natural landscape that mark important trails or locations take their shape from the form or actions of the ancestor who once walked and rested there. Thus, they believed that the Baobab tree, with its elephantine upper branches and swollen base, had been turned upside down by an angry god. The shamans of Australia, when sacrificing to the god of vegetation, kept the image of an inverted tree beside their altar.51 The inverted tree graphically depicts creation as originating out of invisible forces and powers.
Similarly, trees have been used across cultures to represent consciousness. One of the earliest Hindu scriptures, The Katha Upanishad, describes an inverted tree, the Banyan Fig, whose extensive branching network, festooned with filaments of aerial roots, grows exponentially to contain ‘all the worlds in it’.52 Tradition has it that the Buddha extinguished the distractions of the mind under the heart-shaped leaves of the Bodhi Tree, a sacred fig tree, and so attained enlightenment. Medieval Jewish mystics imaged the relationship between the unity of Ein Sof, the Infinite Absolute, and the world of multiplicity as an inverted tree, the Kabbalah, the Tree of Life. Of this tree, the 13th-century Book of Zohar declares: ‘Now this Tree of Life extends from above downwards, and is the sun which illuminates all.’53
Before humans developed fuel-dependent technologies, ancient cultures turned to trees not only for their usefulness – wood to warm and build, or bark, seeds and fruit to heal and sustain life. They also felt drawn to trees for a perceived connection to the spirit realm through the ‘Tree of the World’, the ‘Cosmic Tree’ at the centre of existence, a hallowed space.54 The tree’s trunk served as a representation of the axis mundi, the central axis of the world, with roots reaching to the Earth’s core and branches to the highest heaven.
To this day, the axis mundi of the Cosmic Tree enables shamans to take a journey beyond the bounds of space and time, wherein the physical body becomes supplanted by a subtle body capable of bio-location, healing, and travel to other worlds. Siberian shamans access this tree as eagles, where they fly down to the underworld or ascend to the sky world. The shaman practices his or her vocation through two essential means: that of drumming and dreams. The shaman makes their drum out of wood from the sacred tree. The drumming, like the steady beat of the heart, puts the shaman into a trance state of liminality wherein visions and dreams occur, taking the shaman on ecstatic, spiritual journeys to find and heal their patient’s soul.
Mircea Eliade, in his comprehensive work Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, recounts the dream of one initiate who, ill with smallpox, dreamed he was taken to an island where he came upon a young birch tree:
.... It was the Tree of the Lord of the Earth. Beside it grew nine herbs, the ancestors of all the plants on earth. The tree was surrounded by seas, and in each of these swam a species of bird with its young. There were several kinds of ducks, a swan, and a sparrow-hawk. The candidate visited all the seas... After visiting the seas, the candidate raised his head and saw men of various nations... He heard voices: ‘It has been decided that you shall have a drum (that is the body of a drum) from the branches of this tree.’ He began to fly with the birds of the sea. As he left the shore, the Lord of the Tree called to him: ‘My branch has just fallen; take it and make a drum that will serve you all your life.’ The branch had three forks and the Lord of the Tree told him to make three drums with it, to be kept by three women, each drum for a special ceremony – the first for shamanizing women in childbirth, the second for curing the sick, the third for finding men lost in the snow....55
According to the mindset of classical physics, such dream journeys can be dismissed as nothing but imagination. Yet dreams have a reality all of their own, no matter how strange or surprising. We can be more accepting of the bizarre character of dreams when we take a look at the counterintuitive world of quantum mechanics, where sub-atomic particles exist everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Defying the laws of classical physics, particles pass through matter, influence one another at a distance and, when perceived or measured, change form. Such phenomena help us make sense of otherwise inexplicable scientific findings – for example, the discovery that photons of light can behave both as particles and waves, depending on how they are measured.56
Science acknowledges that the worlds of classical physics and quantum mechanics co-exist, though how they do so, remains a mystery. Yet, in our dreams, particularly lucid dreams, these worlds seemingly combine as we effortlessly walk through walls, defy gravity and fly, travel at the speed of light or even faster, influence other objects at a distance, and change our form.
Such experiences figure in a lucid dream shared with me by a man in his thirties, Michael, who had taken on a new and challenging position at work:
I am in a car driven by my friend driving through sunny, autumnal, remote countryside – yellow leaves on all the trees around us. She takes a turn to the right and goes up a massive ramp and the car goes flying vertically up into the air. Knowing we must come crashing down, I escape from the car in mid-air. Then, I realise I can control the direction of my fall, and I swoop over towards some very tall trees. They appear to be towering pines at first, but then the one I go towards is like a giant dream-like weeping willow. I grab onto its mostly bare reddish branches and they lower me gently towards the ground.
Michael became aware that the usual laws of classical physics did not apply in dreams and so acted accordingly. His dream awareness helps him to think ‘outside the box’, even as it reflects a corresponding openness to new possibilities. He awoke from this dream feeling that, no matter the challenges ahead, he would have a ‘safe landing’.
In the evocative poem ‘Two Trees’ by William Butler Yeats, we are invited to gaze into our hearts, where ‘the holy tree’ stands.57 Yeats bids us to look upon this tree rather upon the ‘bitter glass’ that reflects all which makes us weary of life. At times when we despair, dreams can help remind us of the ‘holy tree’ that Yeats described in very actual ways. One such dream came at a time in my life when I suffered personal grief, having to accept that I would not be able to have a child. In the dream, I become lucid, aware that I am dreaming, leading to a heightened sense of clarity and beauty. The dreamscape disappears, and it feels as if I am carried a vast distance across an endless space of shimmering black light:
...spread across an infinite expanse of shining darkness there emerge concentric rings of intense red. A desire to immerse myself in the red takes hold, and I wonder if the colour green will appear next. But instead bands of deep purple fill the outer rings. ‘Red and purple,’ I think to myself. ‘These are the colours of royalty: This is the Divine!’ But then, rather than staying focused on the wondrous feelings aroused by the light form, my thoughts turn towards wondering what will happen next! I know from many previous lucid dreams that when I think about what is happening, doing so often breaks my concentration, thus ending the dream, but if I can direct my mind towards a focus on the deep feelings present in the dream, the lucid dream continues. As I struggle to focus my mind by singing a sacred song and breathing deeply, from the centre of the concentric rings there emerges a branching tree of red. ‘The Tree of Life!’ I exclaim inwardly. The branches rise up and reach out to include me in their reach until I feel lifted up on the red leafy branches and the blackness into another dream.
This dream heralded an upsurge of creativity in my own life. I literally felt supported and energised by this dream’s branching imagery, which evokes the ‘holy branches’ so beautifully described by Yeats. The experience renewed my hope in life. The emotional intelligence of the heart enlivens this dream and helps to focus my mind, throwing into question René Descartes’ famous dictum, ‘I think, therefore I am’ – a statement that treats the mind as separate from the body and feeling.
In the provocative book Descartes’ Error, Antonio Damasio draws on discoveries in neurology to challenge this dualism. Instead he argues for the inclusion of the bodily sensation of feelings – refined by learning and experience, and thereby shaping our emotional response – as the essential basis of our reasoning power.58 In this case, perhaps it would be better to say to ourselves: ‘I am conscious, therefore I am’ – understanding consciousness as including not only perception, memory and cognition, but also, importantly, emotions, feelings, creative imagination and dreams.
Cultivating our capacity for creative imagination is enhanced by our dream life. For myself, most mornings I get up early to make a cup of tea and return to bed, where I spend time writing down my dreams and reflecting on them. If you don’t already keep a record of your dreams, then choose a notebook and, each morning, before getting started on the day, take a few minutes to write your dreams down, even if you only recall dream fragments – an image, colour or feeling. If you can’t recall anything, note how that feels or reflect on a dream you had in the past and think about how it might relate to the present. You can also consider a recent event in waking life as if it were a dream.
By daily reflecting on your dreams, you gaze into your heart. First note down how you felt when you awoke from the dream – the questions the dream causes you to ask and the questions it might answer. Describe the scene, setting and atmosphere – the emotional qualities, sequence of events, your sense of self, of others, and the dream imagery, including light, colour and darkness. Consider how the dream might mirror the day’s events and emotions, as well as those from the past and possible future. Do you wish you had acted differently in the dream? Is there a part of the dream you would like to revisit and engage with again? If so, what might happen if the dream continued? Were there moments of dream awareness when you recognised how something in the dream corresponded to or differed from waking life? The chapters that follow will give you new ways to consider each of these questions with more clarity and consideration.
When you attend to your dreams, you will begin to see a reciprocal response from your dream life.59 As you work through their psychological content, not only will your dream recall become clearer, your dream content will also become less confused and more readily understandable.
Like a tree whose extended roots stabilise and draw nutrients from the soil into branching leaves, the deep emotional connection and expansive insights that a dream inspires reinvigorate and transform life. Given the myriad correspondences between how we perceive trees and dreams when we view them with the attributes of the Imaginal Mind, perhaps the best answer to the question posed at the start of this chapter, ‘Do we dream or is there a dream dreaming us?’, can be stated as a paradox: We both dream and are dreamed into being.