Dreaming Alive

A Collective Dreaming Project

noreply@blogger.com (gregg) — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 21:31:00 +0000

A Vision: The Collective Dreaming Project is a grassroots effort by a talented group of dreamers, including artists, psychologists, musicians, poets, teachers, politicians, gardeners, housekeepers, farmworkers, children, grandparents, lovers, bakers, healers and business people—to name a few—to teach a larger community the foundations of dreaming and create awareness of the reality of our individual participation in the collective dreaming of the species and planet. This Project intends to host classes, seminars and workshops involving art, music, dance and movement, spoken word, and literature in experiential gatherings to awaken individuals and groups to the power of our collective dreaming, awakening the collective dream within us.

Peggy Noonan pondered the effect of Sept. 11 on our national psyche in her July 19, 2002 article in the Wall Street Journal article entitled “The Nightmare and the Dreams: How has Sept. 11 affected our national unconscious.” She talks about a baby boom since the attacks on New York City, and, also, about our dreams. She writes:

A dream boom, too. The other day I spoke with a friend I hadn't seen since the world changed. He was two blocks away when the towers fell, and he saw everything. We have all seen the extraordinary footage of that day, seen it over and over, but few of us has seen what my friend described: how in the office buildings near the World Trade Center they stood at the windows and suddenly darkness enveloped them as the towers collapsed and the demonic cloud swept through. "It was total darkness," he told me. But the lights were on. They stood in his office wearing wet surgical masks. They couldn't go out, but inside their building the smoke worked its way into the air conditioning. So they turned it off and stood there sweating and watching on TV what was happening two blocks away.

Did you see those forced to jump? I asked.

"Yes," he said, and looked away. No descriptions forthcoming.

Have you had bad dreams?

"Yes," he said, and looked away. No descriptions forthcoming.

I thought about this for a few days. My friend is brilliant and by nature a describer of things felt and seen. But not this time. I spoke to a friend who is a therapist. Are your patients getting extraordinary dreams? I asked.

"Always," he laughs.

Sept.11-related?

"Yes," he says, mostly among adolescents.

I asked if he was saving them, writing them down. He shook his head no.

So: The Sept. 11 Dream Project. We should begin it. I want to, though I'm not sure why. I think maybe down the road I will try to write about them. Maybe not. I am certain, however, that dreams can be an expression of a nation's unconscious, if there can be said to be such a thing, and deserve respect. (Carl Jung thought so.)

What can we do with such a calling? This was made five years ago: what has been done to move this visionary idea forward? Our dreams have been talking about not only the Sept. 11 attacks, but about how our national unconscious has continued to ask us to change: as individuals, and as a nation. The war in Iraq continues, despite millions of citizens opposed to this effort. Are we not, as a nation, ignoring our dreams in the same way our government is ignoring our calls to end the war? Are we not listening to the inner voices that attempt to guide our waking lives, ignoring them as though they hold no “real” authority or power? If the citizens of our nation are powerless, ignored by the “responsible” government, then, too, our dreams and visions are being ignored by us, a “responsible” citizenry.

I envision a Collective Dreaming Project as a grassroots movement to awaken each of us to the power of our dreams, and to begin harnessing this power by our very simple and elementary act of working to bring our dreams out of the night and into the day world: if by nothing else, remembering them, talking about them, and being open to the expressions they seek in the world. Perhaps we don’t need to leave our day jobs in order to satisfy this requirement. Perhaps we don’t need to leave our families, our churches, our social organizations; yet, by acknowledging our dreams, we are leaving behind the status quo that says our dreams mean nothing and only express “day residue,” “garbage,” and “infantile wishes and fantasies.” Taking our dreams seriously—acknowledging the imagery and symbols we awaken with each morning—means taking a new road for most of us. It means opening ourselves to the possibility that there is a guiding force within us that is seeking expression. We don’t need to be artists, musicians, or poets in order to be guided by our dreams. We simply listen, acknowledge them, notice them, feel them in our bodies—and the world will respond. There is a much larger dream occurring that we each our dreaming. Our mechanistic worldview denies the validity of the dream, and look at the mess we’re in: global warming, pollution, dying lands and waters, toxic waste, and governments no longer held accountable to the people who elected them. Perhaps by waking up to the messages of the dreams we can begin to clean our psychic garbage and move into a worldwide movement of healing. In this way we can hear the “messages” arising in our dreams and collectively move past this age of terrorism striking across the world. Our psyches, too, contain the energies of terrorism: for they have not been heard or listened to, and want our attention. How else does one become noticed? How else does one make a mark upon the world? Our dreams, visions and intuitions have been ignored, and they, too, will find an outlet for expression—as have terrorists all across the world. Maybe this very psychic act of listening to our dreams will manifest outwardly into the world so that terrorists, too, will find alternative outlets in order to be heard.

It’s time we take the dream out of the psychotherapist’s office, out of the consulting room, and return it into the world via our bodies. Waking each morning with an awareness of the dream, we consciously move it where it wants to go, into the world. This is serving the dream of the collective, not to mention our own individual dream seeking expression. By consciously waking in it, with it and within it, the dream is awakened into the world. We don’t need to bring it to a psychotherapist in order to validate the dream. We may not even do anything with it.

Peggy Noonan was hearing something deep within herself back in 2002, and perhaps felt it was an “aside” that needed expression, yet had no form. The Collective Dreaming Project, in working to harness the dreaming energies throughout communities across the world, could serve as a form. This Project is being molded right now in our dreams, through our artistic expressions, and in our willingness to move away from the status quo. No war march on Washington will have as much power as that generated to us each night in the dream. This is our march, this is our protest: listening to our nightly dreams and bringing them into our waking world. We awaken from the status quo in doing this, and the collective energies created by this movement will foster change, and the dream of the collective is asking this in these moments.

The Dreaming Is Calling Forward

noreply@blogger.com (gregg) — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 06:48:00 +0000

I have been receiving inquiries regarding my earlier blog regarding hurricanes, nature, and our dreaming. How can we change something we have dreamed together?

The Collective Dream is always being dreamed, and it is always present, always aware of itself, and always being expressed, however it has been dreamed. Each of us is a part of this greater dream of the collective, through our individual dreams and the dreams we live out each day.
How we create this dream is up to us, and we see the reflection of that in our daily lives. We are also in tune with the collective dream, and we see that reflected in our world, and in the dream of the planet, which, if we are able to listen, speaks to us in our collective dream.

We are always in possession of the knowledge we need through our dreams. How well we apply that knowledge is up to us: how much we are able to allow the dream to speak through us, so that we are not mindfully directing it, no matter how odd or strange it may feel to our waking bodies. This knowledge is always being expressed through us, and the more attune we are to it via the dream, the more it will be more fully expressed. So it is up to us whether we are reading our dreams properly in our bodies.

I mention the Collective Dream because it is being played out in a number of natural disasters involving earthquakes and hurricanes, which seem to be indicative of how we are all privileged co-conspirators of these events, witnessed by a large number of dreamologists over the last two years in their nightly dreams. We are beginning to understand as a mass that we do create everything, including seasonal fluxes in the weather. Our dreams serve as indicators as what is manifesting in our human collective, and if it is seen as something to come, then we can then begin to utilize our natural abilities as humans to listen in ways that will allow for the positive manifestations within our collective psyche. This is a responsibility each of us has within, and no matter what kind of brow-beating the preacher might illustrate during the course of a sermon, it is our own individual duty to be in tune with our own inner guidance, and no one else can do that for us.

So what do we do once we’ve already dreamed up a hurricane and it’s heading towards land? How do we change that dream that we’ve already set into motion? Or were we even contributors to the diabolical movement of Mother Nature? Isn’t she responsible? Well....

Questions of that nature should be left to Match Game ’74. Let Nipsey Russell laugh to those questions in this day and age! People are dreaming the truth—people are dreaming the lies, and they are realizing the difference in their bodies, and this is the only we we can each attune ourselves with the greater, and that includes the collective, so, sorry all you “Chosen Ones” theorists. Our dreams are showing us that we have been dreaming these storms for two years and no one had the collective determination to alter the creation of these movements of Nature. Quite possibly, in truth, they were altered versions of something that could have been much more catastrophic in this moment in time for us as a collective. Perhaps we are recipients of a lesser evil in days like these: who knows for sure? But whatever the scenario, rest assured that we are a collective that is part of a greater collective and we might not always have the final say in decisions after we’ve already given our input, when we’ve cast our ballots.

We owe one another the gift of listening to our dreams. It’s time we listened to our dreams in a different way, outside of the limiting psychoanalytical methods and ego-centric vision, and in doing so, we realize our contribution to the overall well-being of the planet, our families, our communities, and our neighbors. It’s too late to affect the root causes of our storm and strife by giving to the Red Cross after the disaster has struck. We have created the storm of discontent in our minds, in our deliberate rejection of our own trusting natures. And so we each suffer in our own ways, blind to the messages trying to awaken us from our powerless images that keep us imprisoned, impotent, and ignorant.

Our movement is always from within, and we have a choice, every day, to choose how we are going to live that movement. We can stroke the fire of passion, stoke the fire of wisdom, and whisper into the fire of love by choosing to live through our dreams of change and inspiration in a new way, and that is through conscious awareness of how we are dreaming up the world around us. We are seeing it in our dreams: changing our perceptions of who we are, and how we relate to one another. We have that choice each moment; there’s not a book on the planet that will teach us how to do it. Only your dreams are showing you how and in ways you won’t recognize unless you are paying attention on the “outside” world as well. We don’t have to listen to a gaggle of crows to go shouting in the night to know an earthquake has just rippled through the neighborhood—we can feel it in our bodies. Our dreams are being felt in our bodies in the same way, so we can listen to our dreams by hearing our bodies speak to us in ways we haven’t heard before. Our minds may not bring back a glimpse of the dream, but the bodies will always have the dream. We can learn how to tune into our bodies so that we can hear the wisdom of the dream in a new way.

Our collective dream is speaking to each of us. It is up to each of us to listen to our nightly communique, and to bring it back into the world with us the next morning. By listening to that dream and attuning ourselves to the world around us through the dream, we can each contribute towards healing the collective dream in a powerful way. The more we focus on that inner source within, we allow for our role in the world to become ever-more visible, and our dreams begin to make more sense. We have stepped out of the limited egotistic view of the dream, and can begin to understand it from an erotic sense, one that speaks through our engagement with the world, and the world’s passionate dance with us. By allowing the dream to be felt in our bodies, and outside of the mental realm of analysis, things in the dream begin to make greater sense to us, since we understand the dreams through our senses, our body. It is the ego-based mind that has difficulty perceiving the truth within a dream, since it wasn’t created as an organ of the body. The intuitive, heart-centered space within each of us is an organic creation of the body, fully attuned to the dreamspace. Cultures indigenous to their homeland, such as the Kogi indians of Colombia, practice the lost art of prayer attuned to the “heart of the world,” the heart of the Mother, the beating of the Satchamama Mountain. Their children are born into a darkened cave, where they will remain for their first seven years of life, never seeing the light of day until that moment. They are full within the Mother, living in that cave, their perception of the world based on their inner knowing. This is the tribe that has said they have “seen” the world progress and “knows” the modern world through their connection with their own hearts and their own dreams—however more advanced they may be in these arts, they are still connected with us in this space of the collective dream. So know we are all doing the work, together—but that doesn’t mean we cannot begin to create a new world as we each wake up to our dreams and our dreaming processes so that others may, too, feel the effect you will now have on the world. It is a strong group process that we are each a part of as part of the collective. These ancient tribes have always been working with us, and they are asking us now to kind of speed things up—in our awakening, that is; in our individual “waking up” to our dreams, and to our relationships with our bodies, so that we can experience a continuity of life filled with inspiration and joy, bliss and radiance, without the static-filled channel of fear that emits from the ego-based mind, smothering whatever glimmerings from the dreamworld we might be feeling during the day, and limiting another moment of change.

It's Time to Take Our Medicine (International Version)

noreply@blogger.com (gregg) — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 07:53:00 +0000