Planetary Human
Living the Eleven PLANETARY HUMAN VISION-KEYS: in Thought - Feeling - Action - Presence
Key 4 - Mythic Living
'Into Lucid Waking-Dreaming'
Ways for You to Start Living mythically
'Life as a waking-dream'
"Everything temporal is but a symbol"
- Goethe
Nearly everyone has heard about dream interpretation - that dreams might contain some kind of symbolic meaning for the dreamer of the dream and that we can somehow or other get at that meaning. There are various and often opposing perspectives on this idea. Does the content of our dreams contain meaning?
Dreams certainly do represent a different category of experience. Not everyone recalls their dreams with ease, and some people have no recall at all. Still, dream researchers indicate that we all dream at times during normal sleep cycles, and by practicing various techniques, dreams can be remembered by nearly everyone.
There are psychologists, psychotherapists, psychiatrists and indigenous healers who take dreams very seriously. They consistently find that people who have regularly monitored and recorded their dreams, sooner or later begin to see meaningful patterns beginning to emerge that are intimately connected to the diverse and deeper dimensions of their life-processes.
These researchers have discovered that we can symbolically interpret a night dream as meaningful, relevant content issuing from the depths of the the creative unconscious mind. In this vein, some of these researchers have also found that we can discover symbolic significance within the images happening before us in the 'waking-dreams' of our day-to-day waking-life. Because of the projective properties of our neural functioning, and because of the creative properties of primary awareness in which our lives take place, it might not be too much of a stretch to seek meaning within the complex occurrences of what is commonly considered the 'objective world'.
Everything in our waking lives can be viewed symbolically and with even a basic knowledge of world-symbols, one can begin to navigate through a life illuminated by and imbued with deeper life-enhancing relevance.
A lucid dream is a dream wherein the dreamer becomes consciously aware that he or she is dreaming. Teachers throughout the ages have insisted that we can wake up from the dream of ordinary life and enter a new and deeper category of lucid awareness ~ that we can awaken from the dream of our cultural, linguistic conditioning and from the limitations of linear-conceptual thought.
"This place is a dream.
Only a sleeper considers it real."
- Rumi
"Concepts are our poor inventions which will never enable us to draw final conclusions about the 'nature of ultimate reality' whatever this may mean..." - Einstein
This presupposes a much larger SELF - 'Who' is the DREAMER of the dream of our waking life. That SELF exists in a larger, more real, a-temporal dimension ~ outside of conceptual thought and beyond the raw and course experiences of impact causation
and the apparent extensions of history.
PRACTICE: An Ongoing Waking-dream Orientation
This is a very simple orientation that can be initiated by a hypothetical question. Like other practices found on this website, it requires an openness to the imagination as well as a soft yet persistent 'listening' to what emerges from the depths of Self.
1. When you are prompted by an unusual event, or by any repetitive emotionally arousing situation as is common in relationships, or by a set of unusual or evocative circumstances; ask this question:
If this were a dream, and whatever is happening right now
had symbolic meaning ... and if these elements of experience before me were all dream symbols ~
what could or would it mean?
2. Sit with this question as you allow your curiosity
to deepen while you open further to
Symbolic Associations
that might begin to occur to you.
Make notes and refer to some of the resources listed below.
"Whatever we call reality, it is revealed to us only through
an active construction in which we participate."
- Ilya Prigogine - physical chemist and Nobel laureate
"There is a Dream dreaming us."
- Kalahari San Bushmen (to Laurnes van der Post)
"Life is a sacred text, to be unlocked through the key of metaphoric knowing."
- Ray Grasse
Awaken Further ...You Dreamers of the dream of the earth Awakening!
"It is a vast dream, dreamed by a single being;
but in such a way that all the dream characters dream too.
Hence, everything interlocks and harmonizes with everything else."
- Arthur Schopenhauer