In the first quarter of the year I didn’t dream much, or, I did but they didn’t have the epic, saga like quality that I’m accustomed. They were felt, slowly, and seen only in fragments. I needed the rest, and I didn’t think too hard about them.
I had also been contemplating the idea of true confidence, true being the operative word. Blind confidence is unskillful and sometimes harmful to ourselves and others— it springs forth from the ego, and is often hierarchal in nature. But Confidence is also a necessary skill in weathering the endless reactions that our environments and relationships have with us. Confidence, or freedom from doubt, is how we trust ourselves and stop relying on others to tell us our worth. Rooting the quality of confidence in Truth, or our innermost nature (our wisest self), is how we ensure that we’re not operating from ego.
Confidence that emerges from unconditional love, compassion, and wisdom does not harm anyone. One of the recurring themes emerging in meditation over the last couple months is that having powerful gifts and beautiful ideas, and constraining them for fear of making ordinary mistakes, is not beneficial. We can distinguish between the potential for real harm when we act from selfishness and self-importance, and merely making mistakes, experiencing rejection or feeling imperfect. (We are imperfect!)
The idea of confidence is a tricky one, because many who appear confident do not actually embody this quality. And many who hold great skill and capacity to benefit the world around them, constrain their talents because it’s frightening to subject themselves to everyone’s opinion. How does one cultivate a skill that does not come naturally, or loosen the tendency to constrain one’s potential?
We may need to discover a version of us that has not been crippled by doubt.
In other words, we have to dream.
Towards the end of March my dreams began to return. First in short vignettes and then longer and more complex stories. It happened seemingly overnight (ha), and
I experienced the reemergence of my dreams as holding unique qualities of venue.
The idea of the “dreaming self” was introduced to me in a meditation with Dr. Chanti Tacoronte-Perez, and as I observed my dreams with more focus I identified several distinct dreaming selves with different qualities. Sometimes they are echoes of the past, or possible futures. Other times they are exaggerations of self, or hold special skills that I desire. Sometimes I’m not “me” at all.
Charlie Morley, a lucid dreaming expert, speaks to the potential to heal ourselves through the actions of your dreaming self. If we dream it we experience it deeply, and much like in psychedelic therapy, hypnosis, or EMDR, the actions of the dreaming self are felt as real events. So we could say that dreaming selves offer us themes of repair/repetition, aspiration/fear, and past/future.
If we can dream it, we can be it— if not literally, in spirit and energy.
In deepening a relationship to the most core essence of self, I began to experience myself not as someONE at all. I felt a multitude of awareness. Paradoxes were held easily, unconstrained by time, radiant and confident, unbothered and satisfied— moments of basking in my own light. My personality and experience of waking life, the earth-body experience, was felt along side the dream selves. I came to wonder about whether I had begun to mistake this particular version as “the real me” when in fact it was another part of “the dream.”
Maybe it is a deepening of that skill we call meta cognition or mentalization, the awareness that my/our perspective is just that. The true nature of reality is not directly perceived, but felt and interpreted. Any other person’s perspective is also interpretation, limited in its ability to be expressed by language and inevitably shaped by past experiences. We use communication to bridge the gap, but we never know exactly what the other perceives. (Though we have been relentless in our trying, sometimes to dazzling effects)
There’s a freedom in knowing that our experience is just one version, because that means that life is changeable, shapeable. And I wonder if this was what Octavia Butler meant when she referenced in Parable of the Sower, “The life that perceives itself Changing.”
Experiencing multitudes of self also means that in all its imperfection, we are enough. Because at that core, there is nothing that needs to be changed, all the internal possibilities are still available.
You’re already whole, complete, radiant.
The “self” that makes our identity is a channel for this inner quality, if we don’t mistake the container for the contents.
Confoundingly, enoughness gives us the strength to change.
And so the dream is also a quality, a version of us where we can do things that are not possible here. We can see and feel and move in ways that are not possible here. And we can heal in these realms too, sometimes in ways that are not possible here. And yet, if we heal in the dream we feel it everywhere.
As I’ve transitioned towards life outside the structured insulation of a self-styled retreat, I began to experiment more with dual consciousness and the Daydream. While I had not especially wondered about birds’ dreams, I have frequently contemplated the way that birds experience unihemispheric sleeping.
In short, while migrating great distances birds can allow a single hemisphere of the brain to sleep while the other stays awake as they continue flying. Another example is that dolphins can resurface at regular intervals to breathe while sleeping, some aspect of consciousness remains online and they float up and then back down to safety.
I’ve done plenty of psychedelics my youth, and now many years of self-hypnosis and mediumship, and I thought surely it’s possible then to experience dreamlike states of consciousness while simultaneously being awake and aware.
I don’t claim to have monk-like mastery of my states of consciousness, but I have come to believe we can experience just as much healing in a daydream as in a night dream. And it’s somewhat easier to stay lucid.
And again, isn’t this the basic premise behind EMDR, Hypnosis, and journeying with plant medicines? If you can practice dual awareness, then you could facilitate this for yourself. A benefit to doing this in your own meditation is both total attunement and the ability to be entirely non-verbal (and even below the awareness of the physical body).
It’s quite magical, and fully within our grasp.
When I had the idea a couple months ago to do a series focusing on dreams, I knew it wasn’t going to be about analyzing or even “working with them.” It would be about becoming a student of the dream. Letting the dream, dream you. Trusting that the dreaming self, the daydream, the landscape, and the unique symbols of your dream world had healing potential even if you “do nothing” or fail to understand their meaning. Presence is enough to collaborate.
If this piques your interest or feels aligned with your current state of the dream, I hope you’ll join me for Dreams, Dreaming, Dreamer. You’re welcome to participate asynchronously (by recording), or engage with our dreaming circle live, or some combination.
Inward Vision 