Many people follow spiritual paths because they have a real hunger for mystery. A desire to feel, know, or experience something that takes you beyond yourself. Each night, when we lie down to rest, we have the possibility of strange, wonderful experiences. Dreams are available to all of us, but are dreams spiritual experiences? Are they mystery? In truth we don’t know that much about them. Rational modern science has been studying aspects of sleep and dreaming for some time. We know that there’s a relationship between sleep and learning. There could be a relationship between dreaming and memory. Things that happen in our waking lives impact on our dreams. There are kinds of therapy that can use discussion of dreams to help us find our way into deeper personal issues, but this is an inexact science to say the least. Clearly not every dream is an inspiring and mystical experience. I know people who have dreamed in extra days at the office. Nothing exciting there. In a recent facebook conversation, a lot of people admitted to still having anxiety dreams about school, exams, and dissertations despite being years away from those experiences now. Magical dreaming can seem the natural territory of the full time professional. The dedicated priest, the hermit alone in their cave, the mystic in their silent retreat in an exotic temple somewhere. These kinds of lives suggest accessing a very different kind of dreaming. We who have day jobs, who angst over our families, struggle with health and financial worries, and fear social embarrassment, are bound to dream of these ordinary things in perhaps extraordinary ways. And so, night by night, we shuffle awkwardly through semi-familiar landscapes, partially naked or wearing only our underwear, into classrooms we had forgotten about where we will be expected to sit exams for which we haven’t studied, while our boss is growing geraniums out of their head, again. I’ve never been a mystic or a hermit, never retreated from the cares of the world. Alongside being a Druid and an author, I’m also a wife and a mother, part of assorted communities, worker, homeowner. I am all of these things when I lie down at night to dream, and they come with me. I worry about social injustice and climate change. There’s a lot to be concerned about, and so the world and its worries remain part of my dreaming experience. I’ve done a lot of deliberate working with dreaming over a lot of years, and I also think there’s far more room for mystery and wonder in all of our lives than we may be inclined to believe. Mystery is not something you can buy, no object will manifest it for you. You can’t be taught it. There is room for it as part of life, alongside and intertwined with all the things we may think of as more banal. I don’t think there’s any kind of training, or program of study or way of working that suddenly turns you into an amazing mystic person whose life is one big communion with all that is numinous. We still have to eat and shit, and deal with the consequence of other people needing to eat and shit, because that’s nature. Perhaps the easiest way to bring more wonder into our lives, is to bring it into our dreams. Noticing whatever we get and taking it seriously, reflecting on it, and being interested in it is an act of invitation. The person who ignores, dismisses or devalues dreams is unlikely to experience anything profound while asleep. When we take care of ourselves in our waking lives, when we sleep well, and have bodies that are able to rest and dream deeply, the scope for mystical dreaming increases. Many of us are so caught up in the stress-laden demands of everyday life that it can seem mad to even suggest that other ways of being are possible. We can have very different ways of life to the norms that are being pushed onto us through modern western culture. We don’t have to be sleep deprived, and radically over-stimulated. We don’t have to live lives so full of fear that our dreams are all about running away. For people who live in places of violence and threat, fear is inevitable, but some of us are able to choose, and if we can choose gentler ways of life, then we should. It frees up our time and energy for actual living, for being here, loving, breathing, experiencing and finding moments of wonder. It frees us up to do more for the people who don’t have those choices yet. To take your dreaming seriously, is to take your life and wellbeing seriously. This opens the door to all kinds of possibility. Nimue Brown is the author of Pagan Dreaming, published by Moon Books, and an assortment of other Pagan titles. She blogs regularly at www.druidlife.wordpress.com |
Copyright © 1998 - 2024 Mystic Living Today All rights, including copyright, in the content of these Mystic Living Today web pages are owned or controlled for these purposes by Planet Starz, Inc. Terms of Service Disclaimer and Legal Information For questions or comment, contact Starzcast@mysticlivingtoday.com. Reproduction of this page in any form is not allowed without permission of the author and the owner of this site. All material on this web site, including text, photographs, graphics, code and/or software, are protected by international copyright and trademark laws. Unauthorized use is not permitted. You may not modify, copy, reproduce, republish, upload, post, transmit or distribute, in any manner, the material on this web site. Unless permissions is granted. If you have any questions or problems regarding this site, please e-mail Webmaster. Web site design by: Creative Net FX |