How Dreams Re-Enchant Everyday Life

Well, dear ones, I hope this finds you all cozy in being, grounding, walking and breathing your place, your role to play in this powerful moment on Mother Earth. I'm sure I'm not alone when I say that it increasingly feels that doing anything with our precious life energy other than asking “how is it that I can help you, Mother Earth and All of Life?” (and then enacting the answer) seems more and more insane. 

Perhaps it has always been insane to spend our life’s energy doing anything else. However, it seems that over the last many generations, we’ve all been doing just that: something other than serving Mother Earth and All of Life. 

So, that’s just not allowed anymore. There’s no time, no reason for that. I know you feel the same way too.  Because alongside of this sense of urgency to help, to dream, to unify, to create, to shift… there is also this grand heart opening that is happening (at least in the little microcosmic world that I am a part of). People, myself included, are coming more into our heart-minds, as opposed to our head-minds. I heard this recently and it feels so true: we need to orient our lives from our heart-minds. It is from that place that we can best listen to answers from our inquiries to Mother Earth, “How can I help you, and All of Life?”

How can I help?

What do you need of me?

How can I best help all of creation?

As you know, one of my most favorite ways to receive the instructions from Mother Earth and the web of life is through my night dreams. When I am dreaming, my head-mind is out of the way. My ego is asleep, resting, which it greatly deserves. After all, it’s working all day long to keep everything moving forward in life! So here, in my night dreams, my heart-mind is receptive to the instructions, requests, hints and stories coming from Mother Earth herself. I hope, in reading and listening to my work, that you remember that your relationship with and trust in the benevolence and love of dreams is growing!

Today, I want to focus on some of the fun parts of a dreaming practice because honestly, we have to enjoy something if we are going to stick with it, right? If we don't find enjoyment and pleasure and delight in a practice, then in the long term, it's really probably not going to stick around in our life rhythm.

I am a Gemini moon. This part of me can buzz from here to there and back again. But the dreaming path has stuck with me for many years… because it is fun! There are so many “side benefits” of a dream-weaving practice! I’m so grateful to be able to think of it in this way, because of my late herbal mentor, Tierney Salter, who ran the business The Herbalist. She was also a Gemini, by the way! She would talk about the side benefits of taking herbs. So many of us are accustomed to thinking about side effects as only negative consequences… but there are also positive consequences, or Side Benefits. These are the beneficial things that flow, grow, and flourish in our lives as a result of doing something. 

So, on the dreamweaving path, what are the side benefits that we will notice in our lives? I’ll share with you some of the trends that I have tracked in people I’ve worked with over the years, as well as my own. 

The first benefit of a dreamweaving practice is that you will very likely notice an increase in the occurrence of synchronicity. Synchronicity is essentially when what is showing up in the dream world is also showing up in the waking world. We often think of this as a coincidence, but it is actually so much more. There is a connection happening between the dreaming and waking world, and when we turn in dreaming’s direction, we will notice an increase in this synchronicity. For example, let's say I dream about the goddess Kuan Yin. The next day, I overhear people in the grocery store talking about Kuan Yin. Later that day, I am at a friend's house and I look over and there is an image of Kuan Yin that I had never noticed before. These are synchronicities. What is happening in dreaming is also showing up in waking. That’s a beautiful sign that our dreamweaving practice is working, because the blending of the dreaming and waking world, and our ability to ground it, is growing. 

If there was something as concrete as a goal in a dreaming practice, this is it! When there is more synchronicity, we can take that to mean that we are in an increased alignment with what could be called the Dao or the flow or The Dream of the Earth and her heartbeat, that pulse of rhythm that is the great cohering factor of this world. You may even reach a point where this connection between the two worlds becomes one-to-one, and you notice a corresponding waking synchronicity for each symbol you dream. It becomes an active, ongoing conversation where the sense of separation continues to soften and awareness grows around just how much there is this constant dialogue happening between the dreaming and the waking.

Another related side benefit of a dream weaving practice is a growing sense of enchantment and wonder in each and every day. MAGIC! Likely, it’s because of the increasing synchronicity that you are experiencing. These sacred coincidences, Deja-vu, goosebumps happen with greater frequency and regularity, and that serves to re-enchant our everyday lives. 

For me, there were decades where I was painfully aware of the gray, blah, hum-drum feeling of this over-cultured world. This over-arching “Over-culture” would like us to think in this grey way, so that we buy into the capitalistic, overconsuming lifestyle that it’s trying to sell us. But, in my opinion, life should be full of magical connection, synchronicity, and enchantment. And what I have found in this dream-weaving practice, is a re-enchantment of All of Life. This is why, after all these years, my (somewhat impatient) Gemini moon has stuck with the dreaming practice. The sense of wonder and magic that has been built in my life is now with me, even through the hard chapters. But even in those hard chapters, that sense of magic and synchronicity which then leads to purpose and hope are also there. The re-enchantment of our everyday lives is a great, benevolent, merciful blessing of the dreaming path. 

A third side blessing of a dreamweaving path is an increase in our awakening. The masterful Robert Moss says so eloquently that dreaming has nothing to do with sleep, and is all about waking up. Waking up out of the slumber of this world, waking up out of the spell of the Over-culture, waking up out of the false myths that were placed on us. Waking up out of, in an even deeper way, the experience of our separateness, the experience of time being linear, and the experience of individuality. That is not all that there is: you and I both know that. This experience that we are having right now is just a sliver of all that we are. Dreaming wakes us up to this more every night. 

Many of you are likely experiencing, in your night dreams, occurrences of time traveling, past lives, parallel lives, meetings with spiritual beings or other aspects of your soul-self beings. All of these experiences are steps on the path of spiritual awakening. This is an energy that absolutely grows the more we turn in dreaming's direction. Personally, I am at a point now where the dreams themselves are my greatest spiritual teachers and mentors. 

Another beautiful side benefit, which might be my favorite, is that the more open our dream doors are and the more trusting we are in dreaming's wisdom, the more we are recruited by the Web of Life to help the Web of Life. While not only being downright magical and enchanting, this also creates a feeling of purposefulness. One way to conceptualize this is that we, you and I, experience ourselves primarily as individuals, separate selves, but in reality, we are a part of many different microorganisms. I am a part of the microorganism of my marriage, of my family, of my community, and of the wild ecosystem of the land where I live. I am a part of all of these communities, which I often call “Circles of Kinship”. I'm also a part of the community of my students and clients. In all of these communities of microorganisms, there is a force, a pulse that wants to help to heal the whole system. So, it will recruit help from different nodes within a given system in order to help others to help the whole.

Here are a few examples of how this works: One night I had a dream where there was a tree that I recognized as the hazelnut tree that grows on my driveway. It was simply saying, “Help, help.” It was showing me that its branches were being heavily weighted down by snow. There was too much snow in the branches and it was asking me for help. In the morning I remembered the dream and knew to take action on it. I went down and checked the hazelnut and, sure enough, there were branches that were weighted down by too much snow. So, I said, “Thank you, brother, for sending me that request. Here, let me dust that snow off for you.” 

That kind of dream happens regularly for me, and chances are it does for you as well. The land where we are will ask for help, but often the people we are around will also be asking for help. Especially if you are in a role of service to clients, students, your children, or anybody: you will, if you keep the door open, be recruited to help those human people more. (That is a whole topic of its own, which I address in my course, Herbal Dreamers, that really goes into the nitty-gritty nuance of that!) Suffice to say that a beautiful, blessed downstream side benefit of a dreamweaving practice is that we are recruited to help the Web of Life more.

Finally, and this one is fun, is that a dream weaving practice, when done over the years with dedication, tends to quicken the rate of manifestation. If we are really looking at our dreams: tracking, recording, wrestling with their meaning, and then taking action on them, then the pace at which they become manifested into physical reality is quickened. Hopefully you can feel why… it’s the action of the process. Manifestation is kind of a mixed bag these days because a lot of people have misused the intentionality of the process... so we may be better off saying that we have grounded, embodied, or incarnated the dream. And when we go through the dreamweaving process again and again and again, we quicken the incarnation of the dream energies. To look at this from another way: if we don’t know how to dreamweave (record, interpret, and take action on our dreams), the message from the dream tends to repeat over and over. If we aren’t receiving and working with the messages, they might get stuck in this process and never reveal themselves into the waking life. 

Here's an example: My first book, Seasonal Herbalism, A Beginner's Path to Medicine Making and Dreaming with Mother Earth, was 100% seeded in the Dreamtime. I had a series of three dreams over a few months about writing this book. It’s very possible that I could have manifested those ideas into reality, aka: wrote the book, a lot more quickly if I had just listened to the first dream. In reality, it took three dreams where I was holding a book in my hands named Seasonal Herbalism. When I finally took that dream symbol, sat with it, wrestles with it even, I was able to see (with goosebumps!) how great of an idea that was. I was able to conceptualize what my dreams were telling me: that a great way for me to pull together all of my life’s work up to that point was to write a book. And so I did, and now it’s here (check it out)! You can feel that, if I had disregarded those dreams, then the message still would have gotten through somehow some way, but it would have taken longer. I really think that the more we are paying attention to our dreams and skillfully figuring out what they mean, the quicker we can Incarnate, manifest, and move their energies along, grounding all of that in the context of a prayer to benefit All of Life. 

Dreamweaving is magic!  It's helpful, it's supportive, it's enchanting, it’s never-endingly delightful. The key to an ever expanding, ever more enchanting, ever more evolving life of dreaming and dreamweaving is simply to have in your heart and mind a state of childlike wonder… of being so excited about the adventures that it's going to go on tonight, and the magic that is going to come. That is the key to traveling on the dream threads. I hope that inspires your dedication to your own, personal, dreaming practice.  Keep at it, and the side benefits of your practice are well on their way. 

So blessed be your dream weaving, dear ones. May it be delightful.