The Power of Lucid, Active Dreaming
05.18.06
Dear Dreamers.
An update on the Janie/Johnny DreamSeed Project. (In the first Fort Mason Gate piece of March 21, I outlined the idea of upping the active-ante of openly promoting lucid/active dreaming while carrying my Dream Peace sign and otherwise being out & about.) Here’s what I’ve gleaned so far. [Bringing up dreams to strangers; Prejudice against dreams; Dreams for the disabled; Ted Kennedy & training dream engineers; Your night at school; new handout card.]
First, in just this short time, bringing up dreaming has become a much more comfortable part of my ‘casual’ patter with strangers. “I’m doing a lot more to remember my dreams these days. How about you? My favorite remembering trick is to give the dream a quick title, nothing fancy, not literature, just a quick descriptive phrase like ‘Pile of Dirty Socks.’” HaHa. A laugh always helps.
If I get a chance, I send them to mossdreams & say, “Try any of the books.” I hand them the Power of Dreaming card as often as I can.
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There are other tidbits to share with you. There keeps coming up an undercurrent of unconscious prejudice against ‘dreams’ as having a connotation of ‘pie in the sky.’ I’m now prepared for this & go straight for dreams, in addition to being amazing fun, as being a powerful resource. I changed the title of my handout card to say ‘The Power of Lucid, Active Dreaming.’ I say something like (as if conspiratorially sharing), “Of course Albert Einstein got the theory of relativity in active visioning and Mozart says he found his symphonies ‘whole in lively dreams.’ And when I can use a few sentences about Harriet Tubman, “Did you know that Harriet Tubman guided all her folks on the Underground Railroad away from the overseers and dogs through her ability to lucid dream? I was never taught that in school. Were you?”
I was talking to a client who is a nurse about the idea of getting nurses in hospitals & nursing homes to introduce dreaming/visioning to their transitioning patients. She said she didn’t see many people who were about to die anymore. Then a flash came to me about how dear & excellent it would be if people who were physically disabled (cerebral palsy; war-maimed; etc etc) could be taught to dream – what a vacation, a relief, and a power of study and fun and exploration it could be. How ameliorating. I remember years ago paralyzed Chris Reeve saying that he still rode and sailed in his dreams.
Obviously one would need to be alert to keeping both parts of their lives in balance.
Having been financially poor and in mind/heart with so great a good fortune of many mansions, an absurd abundance of poetic riches, I realize how dream travel has kept me from any envy or enervating longing. I have never felt ‘stuck’ as I see so many people. The same thing could happen for people in wheelchairs.
After the nurse’s kid graduates from high school in a month, she and I are going to meet to talk more about including nurses in dreamseeding.
I saw Ted Kennedy on Larry King talking about <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />China graduating 750,000 engineers and India 350,000 engineers, and America only 75,000 engineers. He spoke of his concern about our nation’s future. I got a flash that what we also need is to start training & graduating tens of thousands of dream engineers every year in the USA. That as we have ambassadors to Switzerland & England, we need ambassadors to the DreamLands.
One of my most popular lines so far is “With my fabulous & lucky education, no one ever even once asked me, ‘How was your night at school.’ They look curious. “I bet you ask your kid every day, ‘How was your day at school.’ One of the most important things for your kid’s future would be to add dream resources to their life. Every morning ask, ‘How was your night at school.’”
I’ve distilled my quik handout card even more for the Lightning DreamWork with the mnemonic device for remembering the steps & taking folks right to the webpage with that article. Note that I also made a quik list of the steps themselves.
The Power of Lucid, Active Dreaming
try Dreaming True by Robert Moss
http://www.mossdreams.com/lightning.htm
Lightning DreamWork mnemonic:
Two Ducks Suddenly Quack 3 Times; Four Red
Cavorting Kangaroos Ingest A Banana Split
title; dream story; 3 questions: feelings? reality
check? what want to know? if my dream; action;
bumper sticker; email: pogblog@yahoo.com
my blog=http://pogblog.blogharbor.com
Click on Dreams in Category column on Right
Anyhow, cheers. I’d love any tips or feedback on how it’s going with you in the spreading the word about lucid/active dreaming.
Carpe dreams,
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the education-obsessed world begins today with you ..
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Mr. Pogblog,
I really liked this….defense of dreaming and dream awareness.
fwiw, you talked me into making more of an effort to remember and talk about my dreams (the sleeping ones not the daydream ones though those are fine too) with my wife. I think our dreams are a much less guarded bridge to our inner feelings.
CL, I'm a 1000% thrilled that you and your wife are remembering and sharing dreams more.
If you haven't had a chance to check out Robert Moss' article on Lightning Dreamwork yet, I recommend it completely as a quick and elegant framework for people to fruitfully share dreams.
The trickiest step is the one where the listener gets to say, “If it were my dream, I might xyz …”
It takes some practise & discipline to always preface each suggestion with If it were my dream instead of declaring a kind of therapeutic tone, “Your dream might mean this or that” or “Mountains usually mean a long journey” or some such. It's essential to guard the fact that the only real arbiter of the dream & its meaning is the dreamer.
I should add to above that after you read the Lightning Dreamwork article, then you can use the mnemonic device to remember the steps.
Steps: title; dream story; 3 questions: feelings? reality
check? what want to know? if my dream; action;
bumper sticker;
Mnemonic to remember steps: Two Ducks Suddenly Quack 3 Times; Four Red Cavorting Kangaroos Ingest A Banana Split
Make sure you don't try to make the first-step title 'poetic' or 'literary.' Just descriptive — quick & dirty (cf qdos — quick & dirty operating system).
Remember the idea of entering dreams from being semi-awake or museLand — it's a much handier way to be active/lucid in your 'dream' state than looking for your hands. (Tho of course experiment with it all!)