It’s My Soul That Dreams Me (And Why BelievingThis Matters!)

Having a strong cosmology about dreams is helpful because it creates a container in which a beautiful dreaming practice can flourish. Dreaming works within the constructs of what you believe… One example of this: if you are a Tibetan Buddhist, there is a whole cosmology available to you around what dreams are, why they come, where they come from, what their purpose is… and so that is your cosmology around dreams.

However, many of us in this modern time don't have an intact worldview about what this world is, why we've come, what we're here for, etc. and so a large part of the dreaming path is to re-myth, re-sort, and re-organize all of the things (or the lack of things) that we have been taught to believe about dreams. In my case, I chose not to carry some of those early “lessons” forward, and so had to seek out new teachings that were more in alignment with my heart.

And so, dear readers, I have compiled here various teachings that I've learned from others, as well as experienced in my own dreaming as to what works.

So what do I believe about dreams, what they are, and why they come?

First and foremost, YOU are the authority on YOUR dreams! They are nothing less than your relationship with yourself! They may be connected to or informed by the dream of the earth, the land, your ancestors, etc.- but they are a custom-made conversation between your dreaming self and your waking self. That doesn’t mean we can’t support and seek counsel from each other (and we should!), but that you practice listening to your inner authority and inner wisdom, and everything filters through what YOU believe about life and the mystery of this word.

What I have found in cultivating relationship with my inner wisdom and my inner authority is that it speaks through my body somatically as well as through my feelings. This is a learnable and transferable skill that dream workers and members of dream groups and dream councils also use when they are learning how to track their “aha”: the feeling you get when the discovered meaning of a dream resonates with you. Maybe that comes with goosebumps, a heart opening, shedding tears, etc. Our bodies are ALWAYS informing us about what resonates, and practicing that skill is invaluable. So, if anything here doesn’t resonate for you, that’s WONDERFUL. You can take that differentiation and form your own solid structure around what you believe about dreams which will serve as a container for you to catch your dreams and work with them!  

Once I have recorded a dream, I believe that it is the job of my waking mind to decipher the meaning of that dreams and to integrate it’s transformative contents. Nighttime dreaming is only half the job. Daytime dream weaving, seeking of meaning, making of meaning, weaving of meaning is the other half. We MUST do that other half, we have to take the time to cultivate skillful means to figure out what our dreams mean for us, take action, and align that action back to the wisdom of the dreams. One teaching and belief that comes from my late teacher, Jeremy Taylor, author of The Wisdom of Your Dreams, is that all dreams have infinite meanings. There is no RIGHT answer to any one dream. Think back on a dream that you had 20 years ago, and it will mean something different to you now that it did then. We want to be in relationship with the meaning that has resonance for us NOW.

I believe that there is an infinite higher self that human beings (including me!) have forgotten and are in a process of remembering. I believe that I am a part of a larger soul that has slipped into this world, and that who I am is but a fraction of all that I am. I am in a process of remembering my wholeness and interconnection with all things. My higher self is beyond my ego awareness- who I believe I am when I am awake. Of course, I am so grateful for my ego-awareness, the part of me who drove my kids to school this morning, made my lunch, that remembers what I have done thus far in my life, that has hopes for the future. Often, for folks who have not yet turned in the direction of spiritual development or personal growth, the ego-awareness is all that they think they are- and that was definitely the case for me for parts of my life! Dreams come to help me remember that I am more interconnected with all things. They help me each and every night to be more whole. We are all multidimensional beings, and dreams hook me back into this multidimensional truth. I really can't overstate how much dreaming has been my teacher in this. Ever growing, ever expanding, understanding that I am but a small fraction of all that I am! What a powerful gift that dreaming is helping me to awaken to this larger concept!

If I am connected to all things, then i can dream at any level of connection! Maybe this is why we can, and do, dream of the lands where we live, where our ancestors lived, where we will live in the future, and where our descendants will live. We absolutely dream about our ancestors and future descendants, and we dream for loved ones and those that we are connected with. We dream with the plants, nature, and animals because we are all connected. And we dream from other planetary beings like the moon, planets, and constellations. We can dream with and from all of these layers.

Following, I believe that because I am a member of the web of life, I am connected to and being dreamt by what I call “The Dream of the Earth.” The Dream of the Earth is that great cohering force of this world that wants to keep this world going. In this sense, I might just be a cell in the body of this earth and therefore am informed, inspired by, and beholden to her dreaming. I am listening to and enacting her dreaming because I am a part of her.  Night dreams are a very effective way to receive her instruction, inspiration, and guidance.

Another fascinating perspective on this comes from the Tibetan Buddhists, as well as many other ancient traditions, who say that that this world that you are experiencing currently while you're reading this is actually the dream world, and what we experience as dreams is actually the real world. The deeper I have gone into my relationship with dreaming and lucidity (although I am not speaking literally of lucid dreams here), I have come to believe this as well. This is connected to one of my first beliefs that this world is but a fraction of all that I am. What we call the “dream world” and the “waking world” are both equally essential to this existence.

I believe that I have an inner dream weaver (some folks call it the dream maker or the dream source) that creates dreams.  I also find empowerment and inspiration in saying that I have a dream door within myself that is specifically made to catch or receive the dreams from my dream weaver each and every night. I believe that this dream weaver within me is an absolutely masterful storyteller. She spins these incredible tales comprised of outlandish, amazing, and perfect symbols and characters. I wonder if she is saying “maybe if I weave this story, she will wake up to and remember this now.” This architecture of dreams: the symbols and characters, aren’t concrete. Rather, they are like the packaging or clothing that different energies are wearing in order to wake us up and make us pay attention!

For example, if I dream about a celebrity like George Clooney, he is not “George Clooney the person,” but rather the most perfect symbol or ambassador that my dream weaver could find to get me the message that she needs to get me.

If I dream about yellow rain boots, the boots are just the perfect packaging of whatever message is woven inside of those rain boots! Maybe that’s the perfect symbol tonight to grab my attention. Upon waking maybe wearing the yellow rain boots or watching a George Clooney movie might help to unlock the message within the dream-versions of those symbols. I’d like to note here that there are oftentimes LITERAL components to our dreams as well- more on that to come.

When I was in the beginning of building relationship with my dreams, I learned from Jeremy Taylor that “all dreams come in service to my health and wholeness”. I believe that dreams have my back, and that they are completely, unequivocally, without exception on my side. They come from my soul to me, via dream, to help me remember more of who I am. I even believe that the terrifying twisted nightmarish dreams come in service to my health and wholeness! That doesn't mean that they're not sometimes harder to deal with, to implement, to integrate, and to unleash the contents of; however.

Also inspired by the teachings of Jeremy Taylor, I believe that all dreams break new grounds in our conscious awareness. No dreams come to tell us what we already know! For a long time at the beginning of my journey, I disregarded dreams because they just didn't make any sense! But with this teaching, I was able to understand that dreams almost always feel like they make no sense because they're not yet supposed to make sense! The journey to discover what our dreams mean is our duty and responsibility in the waking half of life. So it is our job to catch the dreams and write them down, so that we can work with them while we are awake.

I believe that dreams are not beholden to time and space. This belief was another that I grew into over time, and was taught primarily by the dreaming itself. You probably have had an experience of this: dreaming something that happens before it happens in this timeline, aka dreaming the future. These are often called prophetic dreams, and it is my belief and experience that this happens SO much more often than we can catch. I believe it’s one of the reasons that Homo sapiens, our ancient ancestors, evolved the capacity to dream.

Why do dreams do this? They help us to foresee our future challenges or dangers, they help us to prepare for possible futures to increase our survivability. The more you embrace this belief, you can create more availability in your mind to look at your dreams and see if there are any parts that could be prophetic, and I guarantee the more you will find! I can and do dream about the future so that I can be better prepared to face what is coming. Because of this, we can help to mold the manifested future by being in deep relationship with our dreams.

If we look at this from a karmic perspective, we have the opportunity to work out some of the karmic threads or ripening of karmic seeds in our dreams, and clear them in a way so that maybe not as much has to manifest in the waking realm. Another way of saying all of that is simply that dreaming grows our consciousness! We become more conscious of what we are creating, we become more conscious of our Unconscious, and we can be in more powerful relationship with what is being created through us and around us in our lives.  

I believe you can be visited by loved ones and ancestors, and that we can visit the future and the past. We can experience all of our parallel lives. In this way, dreams have also become my spiritual teacher, showing me when I'm ready to receive and integrate more layers of spiritual teachings and experiences. When I first started working with dreams, I wasn’t having multi-dimensional time travel dreams. But as my psyche was attuned, it grew to be able to handle those kinds of dreams, and they began to happen more and more. And so my cosmology around dreaming as had to shift. As we grow, our cosmology around dreaming does shift, just like our cosmology around the world.

Waking life shifts as we shift, right? Think back to what you believed when you were 12 versus 25 versus now, and all of the differences in how you viewed and understood the world. You may have the same core or you may have changed the core, or you may have just changed in little bits. The point here is to know that your dreams are going to work within whatever your current cosmology is, and its no doubt going to expand a bit here and there, especially around what's possible in the dreams.

Next, I believe that dreaming is soul retrieval. For me, this powerful perspective shows me that aspects of myself, which could be called soul parts, may have split off from me in different times of my life. And when they are ready to return home, and to be re-integrated into my wholeness. This also goes for NEW parts that show up as we live our lives.

Lastly, I believe that we don't just dream for ourselves, that no dream is just for the dreamer alone. I believe that we dream for all of the circles of kinship that we are a part of. We dream for our families, for our relationships, for our communities, and for the world at large, because there is this cohering factor that dreams are an emissary of. If you've never had the absolutely magical experience of sitting in a dream group or dream council where somebody shares a dream and it has medicine for everybody in the room, then I hope you have that experience because that may just blossom an understanding of how magical and mystical dreams are.

So, my friends, that is my dreaming cosmology. I hope that you are inspired to align with or differentiate from my beliefs in a way that is beautiful, powerful, and in service to your own dreaming beliefs and practices. And, more than anything, I hope that you turn in dreaming’s direction, and this turning brings more potency, creativity, kindness, and love for all beings.

May you weave your life with the wisdom of Dreams in alliance with the healing plants of Mother Earth. And, on behalf of all life, blessed be your New Year dear ones, and blessed be your dream weaving.