Dreams of "The We"

Thursday afternoon, just after writing the blog entry in which I poked fun at Wikipedia and the wisdom of the unspecified "ancient people", I read a chapter in Healing Dreams called The Invisible Community.  I was astonished to find a very long collection of stories of people who dream of and with their community ancestors, angels, friends or family who have died, wisdom teachers, and so on.  One of the people mentioned in the book is the author Amy Tan. She claims to recall as many as 20 dreams per night, and once had a long series of dreams with a friend of hers who was murdered, dreams in which he taught her to fly.  I think these folks are clearly tapping into a spiritual realm during their dreams that I have rarely encountered. I have had a couple dreams along those lines that come to mind, and one sort of out-of-body experience during a massage once where I had a vision of my grandmother. But some of the stories these folks have to tell are truly amazing. In one case the dreams continued about the same story for almost a month, the story unfolding slowly over that time, and later the dreamer, a psychologist, met her client to whom that story had happened exactly as she dreamed it.

In a fascinating research study also mentioned in the book, people were woken during dreams and asked to describe them to another person who wrote them down. In a room down the hall, a psychologist unknown to the dreamer, was studying a work of art. In something like 60 percent of the recorded dreams, images from the artwork appeared in their dreams. This was duplicated with many different dreamers and art-gazers.

The veil is thin in our sleep, at least for some people!

I think I will try to dream of a bottomless tub of hummus and never-ending bottle of Rioja.
Children often have dreams of “the Wii” in which they believe if they whine enough their mothers will buy them a Wii. They also dream of DS’s, their own cell phones, iPads, and motorcycles. My daughter keeps reading to me from a little book she has called “God is Great” the page that says “If you can dream it, you can do it.”

Perhaps we both need a little work on the difference between DO and HAVE. Yes, I'll get right on that.




DREAM ON, SWEET GIRL!