Dreams

Turning to Dreams to Find Guidance For My Life

(Excerpts from my pamphlet Guidance and Revelations in Dreams.)

There came a time when I could not find satisfying answers to my deepest questions through reading books or academic study, or even by talking to friends and family. I longed to understand the nature of reality and the purpose of life, and I wanted to know if my consciousness would survive death. My graduate school professors did not seem to possess this knowledge. With nowhere else to turn, I began to pay attention to my inner experience in a new way, spending hours writing in my journal, taking solitary walks to the edges of town, and recalling my dreams.

Initially they seemed to be nothing more than whimsical stories, some simple, some elaborate. Occasionally I woke with one fresh in my mind; other days I retained only a fragment or a wisp of feeling. The more I paid attention to them, however, the more I remembered. To my surprise, I discovered a hidden fountain of creativity within me. I read books about dream interpretation and began to learn the dream language of images, metaphors, symbols, stories, and emotions. Many dreams provided meaningful insight into my inner psyche and patterns in my life, and a few offered profound guiding wisdom. As I spent time reflecting on my dreams and paying attention to my inner life, I began occasionally to have dreams that seemed more lucid, even luminous.

The insights I received from my dreams helped me make changes in myself and my life. Some emotions became freer, my senses became more acute, life seemed more meaningful, and spiritual perception expanded. Paying attention to my dreams and learning their language, along with other practices, opened me to a deeper awareness of the nature of reality. I had some powerful spiritual experiences during meditations and dreams

My dreams and spiritual experiences helped me sense that I had been born for a purpose still unknown to me. I saw that throughout my life until then, I had been unconsciously moving toward the fulfillment of that purpose. Now it was time to consciously seek and follow divine guidance. Paying attention to my dreams provided me with crucial insights I needed in order to sense and follow that guidance. After a few years of searching, I was led to a Quaker meeting. Soon I felt that I had found the community where I belonged, a people who sought collectively to be guided inwardly by God, a people paying attention to inner promptings, dreams, revelations, and other guidance from within.

In my blog post Focusing on Dreams I describe the first vivid dream, a fairy tale kind of dream, that helped me understand my inner processes in a profound way. Decades later, that dream still helps me understand my life as it unfolds, as many of my most important dreams do. In my blog post Prepare Ye The Way I share dreams about trains that gave me guidance about my health and another one about how to clear the path for God’s work in us.

How Dreams Guide the Lives of Others

In this blog post, Finding Guidance through Dreams: Tina Tau’s Remarkable Memoir I review a remarkable memoir by Quaker Tina Tau that includes and explores forty dreams that gave her insight and guidance for her life.

I interviewed Tina Tau and a short video was excerpted from the interview. See it below.

The full interview is available at https://vimeo.com/948923137/855f47b895.It is part of the Nurturing Worship, Faith & Faithfulness video series.

Collective Dream Work

Individual dreams are unique expressions of a larger, collective psyche.  They carry material that belongs to the wider human community. Because of the collective nature of dreams, issues in any one person’s dream resonate with others. Collective dream work is a beautiful way for people to support one another in exploring their dreams and the wisdom they contain. Dream teacher Jeremy Taylor created some basic guidelines for that work, which can be found here: Jeremy Taylor’s Basic Dream Work Tool Kit.

Taylor taught that collective dreamwork can be a method for bringing about greater awareness and changing society:  In a 2006 interview in The Sun Magazine, he said,  “I’m convinced dream work can help society, because dreams come to us in the service of health and wholeness and speak a universal language of symbols that erase the boundaries we think separate us in waking life. Dream work sweeps prejudice aside and provides a place where anxieties can be relaxed, hostilities treated with good humor, and fears relieved through play. If we could experience this often enough, with enough groups, society as a whole might start to change. My desire to change society rather than just help individuals is why I eventually chose to do this work as an ordained minister rather than a therapist. Psychology focuses on the individual, but the ministry continues to allow room for the prophetic voice, the social gospel, and the transformation of society.”