“You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one” — John Lennon
‘Nuff Said 🙂
The night after I received an invitation to write this short article for a local progressive church, I had a wonderful dream of John Lennon.
The truth is, we are ALL dreamers, in both daytime and nighttime. We can let our dreams just do their own thing, and thus have an unconscious effect upon us. Or we can, as psycho-dynamic therapists suggest, “make the unconscious conscious”. That is, we can actively harness our dreams to heal and grow our lives.
Here are three habits you can establish in order to do the latter. Please note that if you are struggling with a mental health problem, you should only undertake these in consultation with your qualified mental health practitioner, physician or minister. Someone like me :).
Habit #1: Practice contemplative prayer during the day for 20 minutes.
Contemplative prayer is prayer that does not include petition, but instead involves opening your heart to God, Goddess, source, or spirit in silence. Choose a sacred word for the divine intelligence, however you imagine that source to be in relationship to you. When I pray, I use the sacred word “You”, following Norman Fischer’s Zen-inspired translation of the psalms, “Opening to You”. You can use whatever word works for you. Close your eyes and settle yourself in a quiet place free of distraction. You do not need to sit in any particular way: don’t make it about how you sit, but rather about your intention to be available to the divine within and beyond you.
Start by saying the sacred word. This is not a mantra meditation, so you will not be continuously saying the word. Rather, you simply stay with the intention to be present to the divine source. When you notice that your intention to do this has moved to some other goal or aim — as it tends to do for all of us! — then you can again signal your intention by repeating the divine word.
A very powerful statement I read somewhere about prayer was this: “the biggest mistake most people make when praying is to pray as though God is not already present”. You might notice if you are holding this assumption.
Practicing contemplative prayer, even for 20 minutes per day, will increase and gradually refine your awareness of the interior world of images, words, feelings, sensations, intuitions and dreams. Contemplative prayer is like shining a flashlight on your interior world, with intention being the battery.
Habit #2: Journal the contents of your dreams upon awakening.
To increase your capability for dream recall, you can record the contents of your dreams — whatever you remember, whether just a little bit or a lot — upon awakening. I would recommend that you keep a journal and pen near to your bed, or use a dream journaling app. By recording your dreams in this way, you are training yourself to remember what you dream. After a period of time doing this, you might find that your dream recall becomes strong enough that you don’t need to record it, unless you want to. And you might also find that you can access dream memories for several days after a given dream episode.
Habit #3: Dream Dialogue
Dream journaling becomes more useful and meaningful when you add this third practice. This is a more advanced practice that you might try after you have experimented with the first two practices for a couple of weeks. In dream dialogue, you recognize that each element in your dream symbolizes a part of yourself that has something to say to you that is important. Rather than offering a standard interpretation of your dream, the dream dialogue approach gives you a process that you can use to explore the relevance of the dream figures to you.
Here is what you do: first, pick the dream element or figure that had the strongest effect upon you within the dream. In my case, this would be the experience of meeting with “John Lennon”. (I put “John Lennon” in quotation marks to indicate that I am viewing “John Lennon” as an aspect of my psyche). Next, assume the point of view of the dream figure and write down what you think that figure might say to you. Don’t worry — you can’t get this wrong. If you don’t know, guess. In my case, for example, what “John” had to say was something like this: “You can trust the creative process more. Keep trusting your creative process to take you where you need and want to go”.
The third step is to write a response from your point of view. Again in my case, it was something like this: “OK, I will try. Sometimes I find it difficult to trust amidst the complexities of daily life as a married father of three children with a mortgage to pay.” You can continue the dialogue as long as you wish, until you feel stuck or until you feel some resolution. If you become stuck, or if you just wish to go into this kind of work in more depth, you can consult someone with relevant training and who you trust.
In the above short article, I hope I have been able to encourage you to see your dreams as avenues to walk down towards healing and growth in your life. I also hope I have provided you with a practical approach to begin to, quite literally, “live the life of your dreams”.