[Newsletter] Dream Program Doubles Confidence in Working with Dreams

Hello dreamers,

I like to fill this newsletter with answers to your questions about dreams and how to understand them. In this edition, you will learn about Sleep Paralysis and how best to respond if you experience it.

You will also hear from recent graduates of our Embodied Experiential Dreamwork program about what they learned and loved about the program. It is humbling to receive such sweet feedback -- thank you all.

I had a fun conversation about clinical dreamwork and focusing with Gregory Rosa for his 'Dream Treasures' podcast. Listen to it here.

For more dream info, I invite you to check out my popular instagram account @dreamsdemystified, and join me on Mighty Networks.

For advanced dreamers wanting to sample different methods for leading dream groups, I have a few spaces available for a 4-class session in May.

Lastly, I want to tackle the simple question: what does my dream mean? In fact, as you will see, I think it's the wrong question to ask of a dream. Read on to see why.

A first encounter with sleep paralysis (SP) is usually terrifying. But for those who experience it often and learn to stay calm, it can be entryway to lucid dreaming and extraordinary states.

Ryan Hurd, a sleep paralysis expert, has experienced hundreds of episodes himself and offers a road map for those who experience it. The following is a summary of his book, Sleep Paralysis, A Guide to Hynagogic Visions & Visitors of the Night.

In Hurd’s initial encounter with SP at age 14, all he wanted to do was wake up from the nightmare: first a ring, then a menacing voice that said, ‘Darkness rules!’ A pervasive felt sense of evil. The strong feeling of being pushed down forcibly into sleep. He was left feeling crazy, haunted and reticent to talk about his experience. It was classic a SP episode, and it deeply influenced the course of his life. He later became both a dream researcher, lecturer and lifelong lucid dreamer.

Symptoms of Sleep Paralysis

Hurd said the symptoms of SP are “near universal” and “noted throughout history and across cultures.” An episode might include one or more of the following:

Inability to move;

a feeling of great weight on your chest, abdomen and/or throat;

hearing buzzing or crackling sounds, or voices;

difficulty breathing;

heart racing;

extreme fear;

out-of-body experience;

electrical current or shock;

seeing lots of spiders or insects;

sensing, seeing and/or bring touched by an apparition or presence;

full awareness and a sense that what is happening is very real. Continue reading...

Feel into the dream images to arrive at your own answers

Yes, you read that correctly. So many people come to me with a dream image or story and want an immediate answer to the question: what does it mean? It’s natural to want to know this because dream images are often so strange and powerfully evocative that we sense there is meaning in them.

But I want to impress on you that meaning in dreaming is not the same as an intellectual understanding or a goal-oriented response to the image. Dreams almost never present a life situation and spell out what you should do. They are asking you to do something quite different – to feel into the image and arrive at your own answers.

When friends ask me what their dream means, I think they are often looking for a particular solution, a quick explanation that will make the dream make sense. But this isn’t how dreams convey meaning. When we’re dreaming, our prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that thinks logically and makes plans for the future, is mostly asleep. That’s why we can’t seem to find our gate at the airport, act in a decisive fashion, or even notice that we are in the strange world of dreaming. Dreams don’t come from a place of logic but instead are mediated by a different set of neural correlates, the same as those active in daydreaming. It is an imaginative and creative state that moves forward in non-logical steps.

Dreams are the same – they are a world apart from logic, characterized by images and infused with emotion. So to really understand a dream, you need to feel your way into the image. The meaning will come through your body and not necessarily in words, but rather in a felt sense of meaning and of depth. Dream meaning takes you deeper than words, so to really grasp it I suggest you first revisit it experientially, immerse in the felt meaning and then you can try to express this in words, images, music, movement, or whatever medium seems best. Continue reading...