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Dream Companions

Mentors, Guides, Friends

imageo far we’ve seen that lucid dreaming is a deeply personal practice and that dream interpretation is a highly individualized art. And yet dreaming is universal. It’s only human to want to share our dream experiences. How do we connect with others without interfering in the delicate conversation between the conscious and unconscious mind? We can find support and community in trusted friends and mentors, books, and, somewhat recursively, the guides in our own dreams.

MENTORS

Talking with others about dreams can strengthen dream recall and the desire to have more dreams, but with the wrong person it can be disheartening. Early on in my dream practice, I didn’t fully trust the value of dreams myself, and I shared dreams with people who dismissed their value. But as I started to think critically, dive into the symbology of my dreams, and see them as more than just random noise that happens when we sleep, I found a mentor who could understand and wanted to listen. Soon my insights and memory improved. The detached perspective of an interested but neutral listener accelerated my learning and opened my mind to new interpretive possibilities. I stopped listening to the naysayers and took the steps to make up my own mind.

Mentors don’t always offer direct assistance. Another mentor of mine was a roommate who, it turned out, suffered from schizophrenia. He experienced hallucinations of snakes and other troubling images. He explained that he had come to accept these figures as part of his reality and that he no longer feared them. I took his wisdom to heart and tried to accept the frightening images in my dreams as a startling but ultimately nonthreatening aspect of myself that was desperately trying to convey a message.

Mentors can also lead us astray. Some people I have encountered have given me information that was inaccurate, didn’t apply to my experiences, or left no room for my personal experience. I found their rigid “tell it like it is” approach to be imprisoning to my creative mind. Rather than let them limit my experiences, I took their advice with a grain of salt and moved on to others who had personally experienced things I was talking about and who knew how to guide me.

BOOKS AND ONLINE RESOURCES

There is something powerful about reading. It allows us to take time to absorb and explore new ideas deeply and then reflect on them. Another amazing thing about a book is that you never know when the right book will walk into your life at the perfect time.

When I was accepted into a military flight program, a friend of mine gifted me a book, Mozart’s Brain and the Fighter Pilot, by Richard Restak, M.D. This friend gave it to me because of fighter pilot in the title, but the book wasn’t about flying fighter jets at all. It was about self-improvement through logic and objective reasoning, not the kind of thing I was into at the time. However, since it was a gift, I gave it a try. This book ended up blowing my mind, and reading it became a decisive moment in my quest into lucid dreaming.

I am not saying that everyone should go out and purchase that book (although I do think it’s useful and fascinating). I share the anecdote to show how the ideas that have the power to initiate a journey of self-discovery will often appear synchronically in forms and at times that you wouldn’t seek out yourself. They are clues to your inner journey. When events like this happen, they’re opportunities to follow those clues and take in the new ideas they’re offering.

Ready for a deeper dive into interpreting your dreams? These resources delve into the history of dream studies, explore the latest dream science, and offer guidance for developing your own dream practice and for interpreting personal dream symbols.

An Introduction to the Psychology of Dreaming, by Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D.—This comprehensive survey covers developments in dream research and interpretation over the past one hundred years, from Freud and Jung to the latest neuroscience and brain imaging studies. Each chapter discusses a different aspect of the science of dreams, all seeking answers to the guiding questions: How do we dream? What are dreams for? What can we do with them?

The Dream Game, by Ann Faraday—Faraday’s classic guidebook for remembering, interpreting, and learning from dreams takes you step-by-step through establishing a dream journal, tracking dreams, and working with the messages your dreams have for you.

Inner Work, by Robert A. Johnson—A helpful guide to understanding dreams through depth psychology. Johnson provides an easy-to-understand process for diving deeply into each dream, pulling out the relevant information, and using active imagination to open and strengthen the lines of communication with your unconscious.

Dream Studies Portal, dreamstudies.org—Trained in archaeology, consciousness studies, and dream studies, the oneirologist, author, and educator Ryan Hurd maintains the Dream Studies Portal as a place for readers to investigate dream research, consciousness, and their own dream images and practice.

My website, “taileaters.com/discussion,” is a place to get involved with others interested in this topic.

DREAM GUIDES

Dream characters can also act as powerful mentors. They can hold important information about our dreams, and that information can then bleed into waking life. Remember the panda that appeared in my dream? I decided to find out if he was a dream guide who would interact with me further. Sure enough, after I set that intention he started appearing in my dreams. In one lucid dream I walked up to him.

 

“Are dreams real?” I ask.

“Yes and no,” he says. “Dreams are the space in between reality, where others’ unconsciousness can meet and interact with each other in a version of reality.”

I found this message to be profound and validating, and it allowed me to explore Jung’s ideas about the collective unconscious as a possible reality and not just a theoretical concept.

In addition to granting insights from dream characters, dreams themselves can offer the gift of insight into the internal struggles that we are aware of. These dreams provide guidance around the understanding that we are more than just our consciousness.

I’m walking on the moon again. A young boy is digging holes in the ground, just as I did when I was young. There is something odd about him—shy and in his own world, like I was as a kid. He asks me to join him; I tell him I will think about it, and then I don’t join him. He has seen through my lie and is upset. He jumps into one of the holes. Jabooty (a female representation of my psyche who has appeared in other dreams) appears again and tells me that she would deal with the little boy. “He’s always acted this way. It’s no big deal!” she says.

Dream guides also can transform over time. What was once a panda might evaporate in another dream into a sense or feeling or even a wind that pulls the dreamer in a particular direction. In the stories of myth, heroes are often launched into their journey not by a physical being but by a feeling or calling that captures their attention. Dream guides can act the same way.

FRIENDS

The most important dream guides and mentors are our friends. Friends play huge roles in our lives and in how we see ourselves. The people we attract into our lives are mirrors that show us parts of ourselves that are difficult to see, or that are invisible to ourselves. As such, they have much to teach us.

If you’ve had a long-term friendship or intimate relationship, then you know that those people change over time just like we do and our complexes that make up our personalities do. The reality of their lives and our lives, along with our perceptions of ourselves and of each other, form a kaleidoscope of recognition. We are painting a picture that’s constantly changing. No one version is the real or final version, but each iteration has something new to tell us if we are willing to listen. Investigating those new angles and versions to understand aspects of the self can guide us toward understanding who we are and reaching who we want to be.

DREAM INTERPRETATION GROUPS

Craig Chalquist, Ph.D., who teaches and writes about personal and collective transformation at the Worldrede website, provides some useful techniques for bringing out the meaning of a dream in group work. His twelvefold dream solution is based on principles of depth psychology with a bit of an alchemical twist. It comprises what Chalquist calls a “reexperiencing phase,” in which the dreamers use storytelling techniques to recount and begin to examine symbols in their dreams, followed by a meaning-making phase, which entails viewing the dream through various lenses and contexts to extract potential meanings. Here is a summary of the process:

REEXPERIENCING PHASE:

  1. Containing: All listeners agree to keep the dream in the room and to be courteous in their comments about the dream.
  2. Telling: Tell the dream once through in the present tense. Bring listeners into the dream, and be inside it as you speak.
  3. Setting: Go into the details of the dream’s very beginning. This provides the context for the situation commented on by the dream.
  4. Decoding: Open up the symbols with free associations to each and by evoking the details of each. Do dream characters seem exactly like people or not?
  5. Embodying: Sit for a moment with the images, sensations, and emotions brought up. Where is the dream in your body? What senses does it involve?
  6. Reflecting: Focus on the dream ego. Where is it in the dream? How do its behavior and reactions parallel how it behaves and reacts during the day?
  7. Conversing: Engage key figures in lengthier active imaginations. Invite them into the room. Ask them to respond to the dream ego.

MEANING-MAKING PHASE:

  1. Distilling: Gather up the dream as a whole. What is it saying?
  2. Multiplying: What does it say on personal, cultural, archetypal, ecological, chronological, and spiritual levels?
  3. Projecting: Where else outside of you does the dream show up? How do its motifs play out in your relationships, in class, at work, locally, or in the culture at large?
  4. Tincturing: What title would you give this dream? Does it want next steps? Does it want to be expressed creatively through visuals, movement, or other forms? What place does it hold in a dream series, if any?
  5. Circulating: These steps can be repeated more than once for the same dream, like refining the philosopher’s stone by running it through the Magnum Opus again and again.

As the dreamer, you may be able to use Chalquist’s process not only to better understand your own dreams but also to inspire yourself to have more vivid and impactful dreams in the future.