Let’s consider the question: why do dreamwork? It takes some investment of time and effort, and most of us are pretty busy with other important things, especially first thing in the morning. So why would we take the trouble to think about our dreams? What does it offer us?
One good answer lies in a basic understanding of mind states. We humans have three fundamental states of mind: awake, dreaming sleep, and deep dreamless sleep. If we take the trouble to remember a dream and give it some thoughtful consideration, we are taking a phenomenon that arose in one of these states (dreaming sleep) and bringing it across some kind of bridge into another state (awake). In so doing we have connected two of our three mind states.
So what? Is this important? Apparently, it is potentially very important and very valuable. It is the first and most basic practice in a series of practices that some of us have been working at for thousands of years. These practices have been given many names and have taken many forms; if you’d like to treat yourself to a fascinating crash course in this subject area, check out Andrew Holocek’s wonderful book Dream Yoga– Illuminating your life through lucid dreaming and the Tibetan yogas of sleep.
To give a rather simplified version of this very complex field of endeavour, we could say that remembering and reflecting on your dreams is step one. Step two would be the practice of lucid dreaming, in which you cultivate the ability to be consciously aware that you are dreaming while you are dreaming. So now, to continue with our metaphor of crossing a bridge, you have taken one of your mind states (awake) across the bridge into another state (dreaming sleep) and there you are, observing the phenomena that arise in the land of the dreaming mind with your fully conscious and aware awake-mind as the observer. This is amazing! And, for most of us, quite difficult to do, unfortunately.
But it gets much more difficult if you progress to step 3. In this very advanced step, you take your awake mind across another more distant bridge, into the land of deep dreamless sleep. Now, if you are able to sustain your conscious awareness in this realm, you are using your awake-mind to witness a state in which there are no familiar objects to recognize or identify with, nothing but pure emptiness and nothingness. Now you are really getting somewhere! If you have experienced this, well done indeed! And if you are able to do this as a regular practice, you are probably an adept who is approaching enlightenment. I have not had this experience, except as brief glimpses, so ineffably strange that my awake mind was barely able to conceive of them, let alone remember them. I’m still working away at steps one and two.
Actually, I am particularly interested in step 1 ½ , which is where I would like to turn our attention now. Step 1 ½ is dream re-entry, a practice that lies somewhere between remembering dreams and lucid dreaming. How do we use our bridge in this step? Here we are bringing a remembered dream scene back from the dreaming state to the awake state, and then re-entering that scene while fully awake and conscious. It is very similar to lucid dreaming, with the key distinction that we are awake, not dreaming, when we do this practice.
I like the metaphor of the film set: we have brought back an entire film set– crew, actors, props, sound effects, storyline, feelings, mood, emotions, everything… we’ve imported all this across the bridge from dream land. We’ve recreated the scene as faithfully as we can, recalling and staying as close as possible to the material that was given to us in the dream. Now… we can walk onto the set. We are, in some sense, back in the dream.
In my experience we have three basic options at this point–
- we can simply look around us, witnessing, observing everything in the scene; giving ourselves plenty of time (time we typically did not have in the original dream) and a feeling of safety (which again was usually often not the case in the original dream). Here we are simply gathering in more of the dream experience without being rushed or reactive.
- we can allow the action to move forward into something new (if you try doing this, you will notice that things on this dream set are not static and frozen; everything is still alive). In this case we are allowing a spontaneous flow of action to happen, simply observing to see where things take us. This is akin to what happens for many people in the morning– having woken from a dream they doze off again and drift back into the same dream; sometimes the dream repeats itself, other times it moves on into a new scene.
- we can bring a director onto the set, a function of our awake mind that can bring in a sense of agency. This is akin to what lucid dreamers do when they decide that they want to use the opportunity of lucidity to have a certain experience, like flying. Even though we are not in a lucid dream state, we can use the opportunity our dream scene presents to us for a specific purpose. For what purpose? This brings us back to the very heart of our original question–what is the medicine that re-entry dreamwork offers?
In my experience the dreaming mind is very good at generating metaphorical depictions of our stuck points, the problems we cannot quite solve, the habits we cannot quite overcome, the situations we keep finding ourselves in. Now, let us imagine that you just had a vivid dream and you remember it clearly enough to generate a film set like this in your imagination. There it is, the whole frustrating, frightening, aggravating thing, laid out in front of you. It may be exaggerated and clothed in analogy, yet still be a very accurate depiction of something you’ve been struggling with for a long time.
Now…walk onto the set. Look around you. In the original dream this happened to you, and you just suffered through it, you didn’t realize you had any other choice, and then you woke up. But now…you can try something new, because you are not just the lead actor, you are also the director. You can ask for a new ‘take two’ that may never have been tried before.
The way I usually approach it in my dreamwork practice is by framing some variation of the following question: “in this scene, imagine that you are your very best, most conscious and most empowered self…what would you ideally want to do?” Now, as the action starts to roll, something new will happen. New choices, new insights, new behaviours. And this new material can become the genesis of new pathways in your mind. A problem was depicted on the dreaming side of the bridge, imported over to the awake side, re-imagined, and used to set the stage for new insights and possible outcomes to be tried and explored. This is the medicine of re-entry dreamwork.
Christopher Sowton
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