Earlier today I sent out my Fall Newsletter, available to read here. Highlighted in the email is news of my upcoming workshop in Portland, OR from Sept. 30 – Oct. 2. Dreams and Eros takes on the forbidden subject of, well, dreams and eros—not in the sense of romantic love, but in the original Greek meaning of the word:

“The original Eros expresses a new thrust in the universe: …from out of Earth there springs what she contains within her own depths. What Earth delivers and reveals is precisely the thing that had dwelled darkly within her.” —Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Universe, the Gods, and Men: Ancient Greek Myths

Erotic dreams often break taboos and feature shockingly graphic imagery that we find it hard to bear, much less share. Yet in dream language these images of creation, destruction, and sexual union hold powerful energies that can help us overcome huge obstacles and transition into new phases of life. Our intent in this workshop is to create a safe space for engaging in this process with our own dreams. It should be a transformational weekend, and those who sign up before Sept. 12 receive a 20% discount.

Other highlights from the newsletter include mention of my two latest Dream Talk Radio podcasts. First up is a great conversation with authors Kelly Bulkeley and Bernard Welt about their new book Dreaming in the Classroom: Practices, Methods, and Resources in Dream Education. I highly recommend the book for educators at every level. Most recently, I spoke with coach and author Simon Turkalj about his new ebook, Double-Dip Recession: The Survival Guide. Simon has great guidance for those who are or used to be in the middle class, about how to not only survive but thrive in this persistent down economy.

You can read the complete newsletter here, and even join my mailing list if you want. I do send out informative newsletters a couple times a year—and who knows, maybe sometime I’ll actually achieve a quarterly schedule.

I spent the first ten minutes of last week’s show talking about how Dream Talk Radio came into being and how it has evolved since that first live show in January, 2008. Then I aired a really interesting conversation I’d recorded a week earlier with Leo Laporte, whose internet TV network, TWiT-TV, is based just a few miles away in Petaluma. TWiT (This Week in Tech) is currently building a 10,000 sq ft studio in the heart of Petaluma to house its growing broadcast operation, which now includes 40+ hours per week of live streaming video. I talked to Leo about how he built his network, and whether he sees its role in the community changing now that it will have a much bigger physical presence.

If you are at all interested in where broadcasting is heading in the years to come, I encourage you to listen to the full show (it’s only 25 minutes long). At this point TWiT-TV has millions of viewers every month, and during each live show there can be over a thousand people commenting through an IRC chat. You’ll often see the show host peering down at the computer screen to bring up a point made by someone on the chat in real time, which makes it a very different viewing experience than watching regular TV, but also fascinating in its newness.

As for Dream Talk Radio, I now have over 1,000 listeners for most of my podcasts, and have many recordings of past shows ready for upload in the near future. I also have several interviews in the works over the next couple months, including an update from Rev. Patrick McCollum about his religious freedom court case.

Not being on the air every week will allow me more freedom in scheduling my shows, but I couldn’t have arrived at this point without the amazing opportunity of having a show on local, low-power FM radio. If you’d like to support my former community radio home, KOWS gladly accepts donations. And if you want to find out about my upcoming shows, I post them on the Dream Talk Radio Facebook page and also on Twitter. It’s a whole new world of radio, people—I hope to see you there!

In 1999 I went back to school for a Doctor of Ministry degree, as a way to step back from all the teaching I’d been doing and reflect on what I’d learned and what I still believed. My dissertation was about women, power and leadership, with insights gleaned from dreamwork, Goddess spirituality, and the principles I’d learned while earning a black belt in aikido. I had seen a lot of examples of how not to hold power, and was convinced that it was possible to do it better, or at least avoid the most egregious errors I’d seen. In my dissertation, I started developing ideas on how to get there.

After graduating in 2003 I wrote a book proposal based on that material, and tried for several years to get it published. (I hope to publish it as an ebook this year.) Meanwhile, a friend asked me if I could teach what I was writing about—namely, how to stay relatively centered while holding authority and working well with others. The outcome was Standing in Spirit, a year-long training and transformative process to deepen personal presence while increasing outward effectiveness.

Leading the Standing in Spirit training for the first time was an amazing experience, and made me feel enthusiastic about teaching again. Then my father died, the economy tanked, and I had to stay focused on other things for a while.

But now it’s a new day, and it feels like a good time to start teaching again. I will be doing dreamwork in Chicago in May, teaching in Portland in July, and in June I am offering a daylong version of Standing in Spirit here in Bodega Bay, for anyone who might be interested. The full day is $50, and will only be open to 10 people.

You can see my full calendar of events here, sign up at the Standing in Spirit Facebook page, and even join my monthly dream group. Getting back into teaching feels great. But having something I’m really excited to teach—that’s the best.

I have also been hard at work on a memoir, called Leaving Hotel California. This is a fun project, combining insights about relationships, funny stories about divorce, and tales of growing up a California feminist. I will have more to say later about this great adventure in satire, but if you get a chance do stop by the site and read some excerpts. I think you will enjoy them.

Coming up this Thursday is another thought-provoking show on dreams, this one focusing on the idea of “Culture Dreaming.” I’ll review two books on the subject, and hopefully talk with someone knowledgeable about the practice. Thanks for listening, and spreading the word about my show and other projects—it should be an exciting year!

I decided to take English 1A first, to get a required class out of the way, and strode into Wheeler Hall one afternoon to look at the print-out of all the TA’s who would be teaching different sections. I chose a cheerful-sounding woman who didn’t list any Shakespeare in her required reading list, because how bad could that be?

Beth, my TA, turned out to be 24 and cute as a button. She was like a 5’2″ Barbie doll, with gorgeous flouncy hair, a great smile, and sparkling blue eyes beneath very long lashes. She held her piece of chalk like it was a cigarette, which I thought tremendously sophisticated, and kept the class jocks in line by sassing them back. Beth was a bonafide liberated woman, as well as being a talented teacher, and she wasn’t going to teach from a standard-issue English text—she assigned us Nora Ephron’s recent book of essays, Crazy Salad.

Suddenly I entered a world in which women could not only sass back in person, but also in print. Ephron wrote about everything from Watergate to breasts, and even dared to title a chapter “Vaginal Politics.” Each week I sat in class, amazed that we were talking about Linda Lovelace and Martha Mitchell in the same breath. Each paper I wrote was a little gutsier, a little more humorous, than the last. Beth was very encouraging.

Of course it was not meant to last—anyone at the registrar’s office could have told me that—but the damage had been done. I had caught a glimpse of a world that didn’t actually exist, except for Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2:30–4:30 pm. In this world Nora Ephron’s writing was something to admire and emulate, which left me completely unprepared for what came next: Robin, the bitter TA who taught English 1B.

Robin’s pathway to a PhD was littered with the trampled dreams of every young woman in her classes who dared imagine that they could write. She threw us into the viper pit of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and stomped on our fingers, laughing, as we tried to climb our way out. I learned two things in that class: one, that I would never be a serious writer, and two, that I couldn’t read worth a darn, either. It took me ten years after that to finally give creative writing another try.

I blame it all on Nora and the way she breezed across the cultural battlefields of the day, tossing jokes out of her bag like some irreverent, feminist, female, neurotic Johnny Appleseed. She made it seem easy, even fun, to be a successful woman writer, at a time when such a thing barely existed outside of small enclaves like New York City.

But that is not the only wrong I have suffered at the hands of Ms. Ephron. Just last week I was reading I Feel Bad About My Neck, and this line jumped right out at me: ”Never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from.” Damn you, Nora Ephron! Why didn’t you tell me that years ago? Couldn’t you have said that back when it might have done me some good, like before I married the guy who was a difficult boyfriend, an even more difficult spouse, and now that we are divorced is completely insufferable?

In Nora’s defense, I was probably too young at the time to have believed her even if she’d said it to my face. That’s just how it is sometimes with young love. Still, even though I was probably not going to take that bit of advice, it wouldn’t have hurt to hear it a few times before marrying someone I now have to be divorced from for the rest of my life.

Ironically, though, reading the divorce comment was also what convinced me to finally let go of my hurt and resentment towards Nora Ephron. She didn’t mean it personally, for one. Second, I figure that if Nora can still manage to be a funny, irreverent, feminist and neurotic writer all these many years later, she must be doing something right. Which means that Beth had it right after all, and Robin merely deserves our pity for ending up as a technical writer instead of poet laureate. She had so much potential, I am sure.

And third, maybe I should write my own relationship advice sooner rather than later, since I now have so very much of it to share. It might help the next woman unable to see clearly due to all the love-bugs squashed on her windshield. It could also prevent me from being attacked for not sharing soon enough. So I will leave you with my first piece of advice: “Never marry anyone (updated!) you wouldn’t want to be divorced from.” I hope you find it just as useful as I did, and even more timely.

This post was originally published on the Blog o’ Gnosis.

“You remember that fender-bender you had in my car last January, Jojo?” I asked her. Yes, she replied sheepishly. “Remember how I thought I’d taken care of all the paperwork and repairs and spending a new fortune on your insurance, by the end of May?” Yes, she remembered that too. “And then how in August I found out they were not letting me re-register my car until I had all kinds of other inspections done? And then I paid for all those and sent them their paperwork in September, but here it is the end of December and I am still waiting for the actual registration tags?” Oh yes, she knew all too well about the incredible tide of incompetence that her accident had unleashed.

“Well, that is exactly what 2010 has been like for almost everyone I know. You have setbacks that you expect to move through fairly easily, but instead they take 84 times longer than they normally should, and no matter how hard you try they just grind on, getting worse and worse, until either they are good and ready to be over or you die of exhaustion, whichever comes first. That, my dear, was 2010.” She understood perfectly.

On the radio today I inevitably wound up talking about dreams and predictions, because it was my last show of the year. If I’d had a guest or callers I would have asked for their new year’s predictions, but since it was just me I started talking about what I thought 2011 was really going to be like.

The first thing I thought about was last night, driving home by myself from the City, and coming across the blinking yellow “Flooded” signs blocking the road, because of all the recent rain. I thought that the road was probably passable since it had been clear all day, but wasn’t sure—and it was pitch black and freezing cold out, so I didn’t want to make any tragic mistakes.

There was a car pulled over by the side of the road, and I sidled up to it and lowered my window. Inside were two or three kids, probably Alex’s age, either stoned or just young and stupid. I asked whether they’d tried the road yet, and they said no. Then the guy driving says, “I just saw a shooting star. Do you think that’s a good omen?”

Without even thinking, I said, “Definitely. I’m going to give it a shot.” “I’m following you!” he called as I pulled away from them, squeezed past the signs, and started down the road. Of course, that meant he tailgated me the entire mile-long, slow journey down the road because he didn’t know any better, but that is a minor side point.

The real point of the story is that I didn’t even hesitate before declaring the shooting star a good omen. That is new this year, the unquestioned assumption that all omens are essentially good. It ties into a dream I had 6 years ago that maybe I’ll talk about someday, but was basically about interpreting an omen positively when privately I thought it might go either way and probably involved lots of bad news regardless.

This very difficult year has been full of good omens, and great things have happened, or have started to happen, to lots of people, myself included. The thing I have become most aware of, as I struggled through this year’s challenges, is that everything can change in a second. Luck is basically random, which means that if you’re having lots of what you consider bad luck, the longer you keep going the more likely it is that your luck will change for the better.

It’s not like I knew anything about the shooting star that kid saw, it’s just that I believe our best move is always to accept the omen as a gift. If nothing else, it means we are paying attention, we recognize an omen when we see one, and have the presence of mind to ask what its impact will be in our own lives. Especially in 2011, I think that kind of behavior is the absolute key to success.

The hardships of 2010 will not evaporate on January 1, and the dreadfully slow processes of change will still be with us in 2011, but there will be real opportunities opening up, doors suddenly swinging wide that we have been banging on for months if not years. The ones who will notice, and be able to act, are the ones who keep going because they know it’s just a matter of time before the tides turn to good fortune. So pay attention, don’t let the bastards (or the DMV) get you down, and remember that the omen is always a gift.

As time wore on and more print media outlets failed, our chances of being offered a paid writing job plummeted. Some bloggers tried to parlay their expertise into consulting work and book deals, while others turned to site monetization schemes such as ads, affiliate links, and syndication to create an income stream from their writing. These strategies have worked for some, but for most writers the holy grail has always been simply to make money writing about what we know.

When veteran journalists Howard Fineman and Howard Kurtz left Newsweek and the Washington Post recently for the Huffington Post and The Daily Beast respectively, it was a defining moment for online journalism. Peter Goodman, lured away from the New York Times to the Huffington Post, said of his move, “It’s sort of the age of the columnist….This is a chance for me to explore solutions in my economic reporting.” Not only did the newer online franchises offer more flexibility, they now had the revenue and reputation to attract experienced journalists away from even the most established media outlets.

As big as this news has been in the media world, I have yet to see someone ask the question that immediately came to my mind: will this trend also trickle down to the scores of talented journalists who are now, still, writing online for free? Most of my colleagues are too hesitant to ask the question, after so many years of hunkering down trying to make money off Amazon links. And maybe I shouldn’t even be bringing it up. But this is the first whiff of anything resembling fresh air for bloggers in a very long time. All things considered, it would be positively un-journalistic of me to not mention it.

With me on the trip was Eileen Clegg of Visual Insight and Program for the Future. Eileen is a visual journalist who creates graphic renderings of conversations in real time. As I interviewed Bill about the history and vision of e-government, Eileen created a mural of the eGov landscape, using the highlights of our discussion to show the challenges and the promise of e-government initiatives. Also there with us was Bill Daul of NextNow and Program for the Future, who took the photos you see here and also videotaped Eileen’s mural creation.

Bill Fenwick’s passion for e-government initiatives springs from over 40 years of working with the judicial system, a branch of government that processes overwhelming amounts of information. As Bill explained at one point in our discussion, the courts are charged with storing and sharing essential documents, records that can make or break lives, businesses, and laws—and yet they do so using technology that is decades behind private industry in terms of speed, efficiency, and useability.

The idea of e-government is essentially non-partisan, in that it is concerned with improving the information systems that underlie all government agencies and functions, so that they can do their job better, whatever that job may be. There are many efforts toward this goal already in motion, most notably through O’Reilly Media’s Gov 2.0 project, but also in small, important changes occurring in public agencies across the country.

Bill sees Program for the Future’s role as “improving the improvers,” sharing best practices and preventing duplication of efforts among those working toward the goal of making government run better. This is in keeping with PFTF’s understanding of the vision of Doug Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse and proponent of “collective intelligence,” the idea that we are smarter working and thinking together than we can be working by our selves.

Here is the complete audio from my interview with Bill Fenwick, which aired on Dream Talk Radio September 9, 2010. Below it is Eileen Clegg’s complete e-government mural.

Download Podcast

When I asked Bill about the push-back against e-government efforts, he cited people’s fear of change, and the security of the status quo. Eileen’s mural represents quite ably the situation facing our society today, with the onslaught of too much information and the challenge of too little time, combined with a resistance to change. Here is her spoken summary of that landscape, as captured in her mural.

All in all it was a fascinating, exciting day, and has given me much food for thought. The American Dream looms large in all of our psyches, whether we acknowledge it or not. E-government is one way to fulfill the promise of our country: to be an intelligent, flexible, responsive democracy by using wisely the power of our own great inventions and innovations.

A version of this article is also published at the Huffington Post.

Earlier this month I spoke with Professor Bron Taylor of the University of Florida. Bron’s latest book, Dark Green Religion and the Planetary Future, talks about nature spirituality in the U.S., and the possibilities for a society organized around principles from environmental science such as kinship with all life. It was a lively, thought-provoking conversation, which you can listen to or download here.

The following week I sat down with a friend of mine, Gus DiZerega. Gus was recently interviewed by journalist Jane Mayer for her well-read article in the New Yorker about Charles and David Koch, the wealthy billionaires who are funding many far-right organizations in this country. Gus knew Charles Koch from back in Wichita where they met at a John Birch Society bookstore, and he told the whole story when we spoke.

We talked about the history of Libertarianism in the U.S. (Gus has been a professor of history and politics, and the Koch brothers are Libertarians), the current political landscape, and got into Gus’s critique of Bron Taylor’s book. It was a wide-ranging conversation, and fascinating if you want to hone your thinking on a number of issues. That interview is now up as well, and you can listen or download here.

Soon I will interview another friend and professor, Jonathan Soffer, who just published the definitive book on Mayor Ed Koch and the rebuilding of New York City. I am interested in talking to Jonathan particularly about how financial issues and social issues interact in cities, and what lessons drawn from NYC in the 1970s-80s can be applied to urban areas today.

Joseph Campbell famously said, “A myth is a public dream, a dream is a private myth.” Dream Talk Radio is going strong after almost three years of original weekly programming, and I am more excited than ever about the possibilities for bringing our private myths to bear on the larger cultural dream. Stay tuned for more provocative ideas and fascinating discussions with innovators in many different fields.

If the ancient Greeks worried that dreams can be deceptive, what does it mean that all this time later we still have the same fear? Has anything changed in our relationship to dreams in all this time? And is there anything new we can learn about dreams and symbols from “Inception”?

One of the things that has changed markedly is our understanding of where dreams come from. To the Greeks, dreams were things they “saw,” messages and visions that originated somewhere outside of themselves that they were witness to while sleeping. Like Agamemnon, they worried about being deceived by human and supernatural dream intruders who might thrust their way onto the dream stage.

Today, we say that we “had” a dream, and believe that dreams come from within us, like a cough, a bad mood, or a stirring in our souls. We worry that dreams reveal something disturbed in our psychological makeup, or we try to explain them away by saying they are just random brain activity. “Inception’s” success as a thriller stems in part from turning the tables on our “scientific” understanding of dreams, and bringing back the more archaic fear of dream-meddling from without.

Lucid dream expert Robert Waggoner has an excellent article on what “Inception” got right about dreams, and it is a great place to start if you want to separate the film’s truth from fiction. I interviewed Robert on my radio show recently and we had a really good back-and-forth over the movie. I have a much more critical view of how the movie handled dreams, but the thing that bothers me the most is how easy it is to plant deceptions and false symbols in our waking minds every day–and how blind we are to it.

As Arianna Huffington pointed out recently, Sarah Palin’s “mama grizzly” ad is effective not because it makes any sense but because it resonates at the level of symbol and archetype. Of course, Palin is the idiot savant of this type of messaging, but the technique is used all the time by people who actually know what they’re talking about, and invoke those fearful symbols in order to blind us to what is really going on.

It should be an equation that every child learns by the 6th grade: if someone is making you afraid, that means there is something that they don’t want you to know, or to think about for yourself. It is as simple as that. Every mention of “death panels” or “the 9/11 mosque” should instantly trigger this response: “Wow, that is a loaded symbol, making me feel all sorts of different things. I wonder what the truth behind it is? Where can I go to get real information and decide for myself?”

To overcome our nightmares, we need to understand and confront the fear in the dream. Similarly, the only antidote to deceptions being planted in our waking minds is to not accept them at face value, not give in to the fear, but find out what lies behind it. If we can do that, then we will have truly moved beyond our archaic fears, toward a wisdom that the ancient Greeks could only dream of.

This article was originally published on the Huffington Post.

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Last year I wrote an article here on “How to Start a Dream Group,” to respond to the many inquiries I get from people who want to explore their dreams with others. Given that my own dream group formed out of a book group 17 years ago, and that our dream group is still going strong while the book group folded soon after, maybe there is something to the author’s assertion.

If so, I think it says more about our overcrowded lives than about the declining popularity of books. Many people are too busy to read books, whereas dreaming doesn’t take any time out from our daily schedules; we simply have to remember them. And in dealing with your busy life, it is a very short hop from focusing on getting enough sleep to thinking more about the dreams you remember now that you are no longer sleep deprived.

It would also be wrong to characterize dream groups as anti-intellectual clubs. Most dream enthusiasts I know have homes filled with books, and they are likely to own several on dreams and symbols that they consult regularly. Dreamers are also writers, and the International Association for the Study of Dreams has links to countless dream blogs and research sites where participants discuss the latest studies of sleep and dreams.

Even if there is a trend toward forming dream groups rather than book groups, I don’t think book groups will disappear any time soon. Consider how much creativity is packed into our dreams, and how profoundly they have already influenced literature and movies. It is only a matter of time before the dreams you hear in today’s dream group become the next great novels, in which case how will you keep up without joining a book group?

This article was originally published in the Huffington Post.

What a treat, then, to find not one but two thoughtful posts on the subject recently by Dick Cavett, on his New York Times blog. In his first article, Cavett writes:

The question I can never find an answer to is the one that makes dreams so mysterious. When you watch a movie or read a story you don’t know what’s coming next. You’re surprised by what happens as it unfolds. You know that someone wrote the book or made the movie.

But who in hell is the author of the dream? How can it be anyone but you? But how can it be you if it’s all new to you, if you don’t know what’s coming? Do you write the dream, then hide it from yourself, forget it, and then “sit out front” and watch it? Everything in it is a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant. And, unlike a book or film, you can’t fast-forward to see how it comes out. So where does it come from? And who “wrote” it?

Cavett was talking specifically about anxiety dreams — where we find ourselves back in school after 50 years and wake up in a cold sweat because we hadn’t studied for the important test we were suddenly taking. (Would the question, “who wrote this?” even occur to us if we only had pleasant dreams?) But I think a more practical question to ask is, “Why, night after night, do I keep assuming I actually have to pass this blasted test?”

It’s almost as if anxiety dreams come to taunt us, not with how frail we are, but with how strong we could be if only we could remember it. Dreams are like a surreal Martha Stewart workshop: At any moment it could dawn on us, “Hey wait, this is a dream and anything can happen! Therefore, with this pencil eraser and a glue gun I just found in my back pocket, I’ll construct a space-time machine and jet to the Bahamas!”

It is helpful to look back at a dream and notice when it started to “go bad” — when a dream scene becomes a nightmare. In my experience, it is usually at the point when I assume that only waking life rules apply. If there’s a vampire I must smite it, but it will always come back to life because I am merely a puny human. If I am at the beach, I know at any moment a tidal wave will appear — and then, as if on cue, it does.

I think our anxiety response mechanism is triggered in these moments, and that response itself actually affects the content of the dream. In other words, it is not that dreams are written by some inner tormentor, but that normal dreams can progress in either positive or negative directions depending on whether we can overcome our anxiety state while we are dreaming.

This is a tall order, not easily accomplished, and not for the faint of heart. Then again, as Dick Cavett surely knows, neither is life.

This article was originally published on the Huffington Post.

Introducing The Dream Tribe, a members-only online community where you can get instant feedback on your dreams, connect with experts in many different kinds of dreamwork, and find your place in the worldwide clan of dreamers.

The brainchild of interfaith minister Amy Brucker, The Dream Tribe launched just days ago. At the center of the effort are what Amy calls the “Dream Team”—professionals who are experts in different aspects of dream research and interpretation. (Full disclosure: I am part of the Dream Team.)

Each of us make ourselves available to site members by participating in the online forums, offering discounts on classes and private sessions, and distributing exclusive content through the Dream Tribe site. As a members-only site, the only people reading and responding to your posts about dreams are those who are truly interested in the healing potential of dreams.

It is a great value for people who want to learn more about their dreams but don’t have access to a local dream group. Registration is open for a few more days, so I encourage you to check it out, and take advantage of Amy’s no-risk membership offer.

I will blog more about my experience as part of the Dream Team (this is an experiment for all of us, remember) but for now I want to welcome everyone in the worldwide network/clan/tribe/consortium/consulate of dreamers to our virtual tribe!

The first is by Dr. Kelly Bulkeley, former president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, visiting scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, and author of many worthy books on dreams. Dreaming in the World’s Religions: A Comparative History (2008, New York University Press) is a book that finally answers the basic question: how did people in ancient cultures view dreams?

I call this a basic question, because anyone who spends a significant amount of time working with their dreams inevitably wonders how it was done in the past. In your religion, in other religions; by your ancestors, by other people’s ancestors. Dreams call us to understand our place in the world, and Kelly’s book answers the call because it addresses the problem with both comprehensive scholarship and also a deep love and appreciation for dreams.

In the book’s first three chapters, Kelly covers Hinduism, the religions of China (mostly Confucianism and Taoism), and Buddhism. He then branches out to the Fertile Crescent (Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Judaism), the religions of Greece and Rome, then Christianity, and Islam. In the final three chapters, we learn about the religions of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. A whirlwind tour to be sure, but with Kelly’s flair for laying out a clear overview combined with meticulous attention to detail, one is left after each chapter with the feeling of having had an excellent introduction to a fascinating, and ever-changing subject.

This book is required reading for my class at Cherry Hill Seminary on using dreams in spiritual direction. It gives the student of Pagan religions a valuable sense of perspective, and the student of dreams a glimpse at the rich possibilities for dream interpretation and understanding in the continuing evolution of our dreaming minds. I highly recommend it.

The second book is not new at all, but is certainly new to us. Children’s Dreams: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936–1940 (Princeton University Press, 2008) is the English translation (finally!) of a seminar conducted by Carl Jung with some of his more advanced pupils, and is the most accessible, understandable presentation of Jung’s dream theories  that I have ever read.

Here we have the master in action, explaining his theories and then showing in great detail how he applies them, using examples of his patients’ earliest remembered dreams. In the first chapter, Jung lays out all of his methods of dream interpretation, which is invaluable in itself but also helps focus the later chapters, as each dream analysis follows the steps first introduced here.

Each of the later chapters include his students (among them Marie-Louise Von Franz, Aniela Jaffe, and Jolande Jacobi) presenting a dream or dream series, then analyzing them using Jung’s rubric. Jung makes comments, clarifies ideas and answers his students’ questions. The conversational style highlights Jung’s skill as an educator, and reading it one has the sense of witnessing the development, there in that room, of the practice of analytical psychology. It is a fascinating and inspiring ride.

This beautiful English edition of Children’s Dreams was a project of the Philemon Foundation, which is dedicated to bringing into book form Jung’s unpublished works. The Philemon Foundation also facilitated the publication of Jung’sRed Book last year; they do beautiful work. Children’s Dreams will make you realize just how much of your ideas about dreams are from Jung, and at the same time will show you just how little of Jung you really understand. I find the combination exhilarating; I am sure you will too.

This post was originally published at the Blog o’ Gnosis.

Making dream resolutions is not like this. Dream resolutions are not about what we want to do more of or less of during the day, they are about what we want to have happen in our dreams in the year to come. Right around New Year’s I take a couple days and read through my dream journals from the past year. I single out the things I did in my dreams that I am proud of, and things that I would have liked to do differently.

This is a type of dream re-scripting, so if you make them yourself just let them come out the way they are. My dream resolutions tend to come out like pronouncements, and I like making them into a Top 10 list. That is part of the fun for me. If you have dream resolutions of your own, please post them in the comments — I would love to read them!

Here are my New Year’s Dream Resolutions for 2010:

1. If you are held underground in a “DNA-resistant container,” get out immediately, maybe by turning into a tree and growing yourself out and away.

2. The lucid stream is glittering all the way down to the gravel, so go ahead and dip your fingers in.

3. Do not give your name when caught in someone else’s library — Google will find out and publicize it!

4. If you are pole-vaulting across the grass, don’t assume you will fail. Enjoy sailing through the air and you will make it just fine!

5. If you see a bunch of little kids wandering around backstage after a performance, bring them to the main hall so their parents can find them and bring them home.

6. Joking about how old you are getting probably isn’t the best opener at your high school reunion. On the other hand, you’ll learn a lot from the reactions you get.

7. Don’t just pass by the guy doing uninteresting things in a dream — he may be about to open the treasure drawer!

8. If a dead relative returns for 25 seconds to tell you your future, and it is everything you want, believe them.

9. Even if the others are hanging back, moving toward ground zero is the only way to get the footage that will really make a difference.

10. Just because you dream of restoring a beautiful theater into a thriving community hub doesn’t mean you should do that in waking life. But who knows? Pay attention, and see what opportunities come your way in waking, and in dreaming.

This article was originally published at the Blog o’ Gnosis.

Why do some people fear their dreams? I believe it is due to faulty notions of what dreams come to tell us. Here are four common fears:

1. For many people whose first exposure to dreams was through Freudian analysis, dreams are like psychological quicksand that threatens to suffocate them with negative meanings. Thanks to Freud, many people still believe that dreams mostly reveal perverse sexual longings and wish fulfillment fantasies.

2. Some self-help programs say that we should be in control of our lives and therefore if we suffer from mental or physical maladies it is our own fault. People with this outlook tend to distrust dreams, believing that they merely show a laundry list of behaviors and anxieties the dreamer must “fix.”

3. Many people experience psychic phenomena in their dreams, seeing future events and things taking place across great distance. Without a way to understand these dreams, people may feel responsible when events occur that they “saw” in their dreams, ignoring or blocking out their dreams because they don’t know how to answer the questions these powerful dreams raise.

4. Most deeply religious people I have met feel that dreams come from God, and are curious about the messages they might hold. But some fear that dreams may present scenes that test their faith or lead them astray. Not having a fuller understanding of the spiritual messages in dreams can cause observant people to fear their dreams.

When confronted with these deep-seated fears, I try to stress that the overwhelming purpose of dreams is to reveal to us our path in life, and to help us achieve greater wholeness. Dreams come from our unconscious, which contains everything in our being that we are not yet aware of. Jung called this unknown material our “shadow,” and it is the source of our creativity as well as our connection with the Divine. While dreams sometimes reveal uncomfortable truths, it is important to remember that dreams are paradoxical, and can mean the exact opposite of what we think when we first wake up.

Dreaming is a basic human function, and goes on throughout our lives whether we remember our nightly dreams or not. When we shut them out, we are inhibiting our natural ability to sense danger, find opportunity, and take part more fully in the mystery of life. We may never fully understand dreams, but even a small increase in our understanding can help us unlock some of their huge promise and potential.

This piece was originally published in the Huffington Post.

Last year I shared 10 great tips for having big winter dreams. But more important than having big dreams is knowing how to work with all the dreams we have. Here’s how to make every dream count, no matter how small.

1. Remember your dreams and write them down. Even if you only remember a word or name, color or feeling, write it down. Dream recall increases the more we practice it.
2. Go for what makes you happy in dreams. Some traditions insist that to be happy in waking life you must pursue pleasure in your dreams. Being successful in 2010 means being bold, so start by doing what you want in dreams even if it’s something you would never do in waking life. It’s just a dream–go for it!
3. Don’t run from conflict in your dreams. This may take some practice, but you’ve got all year, right? If there’s a dragon chasing you at night, coach yourself to turn and face it. Likewise with intruders, thieves, and other scoundrels. You will soon find it easier to overcome obstacles of all kinds during the day. Seriously, it works!
4. Keep tabs on your health. If you are sick or injured in a dream, don’t freak out, but do heed the warning. Dreams usually work on the symbolic level, but sometimes they have direct, concrete advice for us. Always check out a health concern in a dream, it could be the best move you ever make.
5. Pay attention when things go bad. Notice what happens just before a good dream starts becoming an anxiety-ridden nightmare. Do you hesitate out of fear? Is there a misunderstanding that sets things off the rails? Are you listening to someone with the wrong information? Figure out what the glitch is, and start overcoming it in waking life.
6. Look for dream allies and treat them well. Dreams are full of unforeseen turns of fortune, if we know what to look for. Just as in fairy tales, if someone offers you something in a dream be gracious and thank them. It may look strange, but looks can be deceiving, and we never want to turn down what could be a golden opportunity.
7. Always go for the highest good. If you have a choice of two actions to take in a dream, and one of them benefits you alone whereas the other benefits you and several others, take the second choice. Start now to shift those self-centered patterns in the dream world, and you may find that others are more willing to help you achieve your goals on waking as well.

We all have to sleep and dream, no matter how desperate, ambitious, or energetic we are. The good news is, our dreaming minds are perfectly capable of helping us with our waking goals–when we act in accordance with our values and stick with it in spite of the setbacks that inevitably occur. In a year where money is scarce and every advantage counts, who can afford to discount their dreams?

This article was originally published in the Huffington Post.

Dreams have played an important role in Pagan traditions historically, as a reliable means of direct communication with the Gods, ancestors, and nature spirits, for healing, prophecy, and intercession. Our use of dreams today is heavily influenced by Jung and other modern thinkers, as well as traditional and shamanic ideas about dreams. This course highlights some of the ways human cultures have viewed and interpreted their dreams, and used them in a ritual or sacred context. The class treats dreams as a modern source of divination and spiritual direction. Using written sources, their own dream material, and an interactive class dream group, students will develop a framework for using dreams in spiritual mentoring, and identify approaches to dreams that make the most sense for contemporary Pagan ministry. Students will be expected to participate in regular discussion forums, as well as submit periodic reflective writing.

I have taught versions of this class in workshop format at a Jesuit seminary and interfaith settings, and look forward to working with other seminaries to create a similar class based on their own spiritual dream traditions. That is the wonderful thing about working with dreams: you don’t have to be Hindu or Catholic, Pagan or Muslim, Buddhist, Lutheran, or Shinto to be able to benefit from them. Everybody dreams, and our dreams always have something to say about our spiritual practice, our relationship to the Divine, and how to lead a good life.

For those of who are interested but can’t commit to a semester-long program, I will be leading a workshop on the same topic at Pantheacon in San Jose next year. Monday February 15 at 11 am is the stated workshop time, but that is of course subject to change. I will also be on the East Coast in the Spring—schedule to be posted sometime soon—and may be able to teach it there, too.

It will be a busy year of travel for me, and if you are interested in hosting a workshop or book signing in your area, now is the time to get it on the schedule! Call my office at 707-875-3225 or fill out a comment, and I will get back to you right after the New Year.

There are several ways you can use this value: Use all three yourself, or buy two sessions for yourself and give the third to a friend. You can also combine two of the hours and invite another person to share a longer session of dreamwork. I can even work out special group rates based on the holiday discount.

This offer is good through New Year’s Eve 2009, so act now! Gift certificates are available, and make a great gift along with a copy of What To Do When Dreams Go Bad: A Practical Guide to Nightmares. Happy Holidays!

If you read closely the profiles of those at the top, chances are you will find the moment when everything changed for them — and chances are that moment came in a dream. In The New Yorker last month, director James Cameron tells about being sick and broke, staying in a tiny flat at a time of struggle early in his career.

One night, he said, he dreamed of “a chrome skeleton emerging out of a fire.” Then he sketched the figure cut in half and crawling after a woman. He said, “I thought, That was cool. I’ve never seen that in a movie before.”

Unlike most of us, who might have a startling dream image and never do anything with it, Cameron enlisted a couple friends to help him create a movie script based on that image of a metallic death-figure rising like a phoenix from the flames. The result, three years later, was The Terminator, a movie that changed the game not just for James Cameron, but for Hollywood storytelling itself.

Producer Jerry Weintraub would not be the mogul he is if he hadn’t followed a crazy dream in his mid-twenties that began his meteoric rise. As told in Vanity Fair last year,

One night in a dream, Jerry saw a marquee lit against a black sky and on it, in dazzling letters: JERRY WEINTRAUB PRESENTS ELVIS AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN. The next morning, Jerry called RCA Records and was told to contact the Colonel — Tom Parker, one of the most vilified men in show-business history…

Far from being cowed by the Colonel’s reputation, Weintraub called him every day for months until he finally answered. It took still more time for Weintraub to convince the Colonel to go along with his wild plan to get Elvis back on the road. But with persistence his dream came true — and after Elvis’s success followed Frank Sinatra’s, and a host of other big acts (not to mention movies) that Jerry Weintraub made huge.

Not all of us are destined to end up on stage thanking the Academy, but we all have wild dreams that can produce game-changing results. The entertainment industry is struggling today, but in a way that is the best news possible. Who knows how many talented people tonight will have the next big dream that could change the stories we tell, and how we tell them?

One thing is certain: the only dream that has a chance in the world is the one that someone is brave enough, and maybe desperate enough, to follow.

This was originally published in the Huffington Post.

The most famous labyrinth is the one built into the stone floor of the Chartres Cathedral in France. Built around 1220 CE, the Chartres labyrinth hearkens back to an early tradition in the Christian church of walking meditation. Worn smooth by the slow passage of generations of pilgrims, the Chartres pattern (known as an 11-circuit labyrinth) is thought to mirror the soul’s journey through life, and bring spiritual insight to the walker.

In addition to the Chartres 11-circult labyrinth, there is an even more ancient pattern known as the Cretan or 7-circuit labyrinth, which was found in Neolithic rock carvings. This pattern is easy to construct by sprinkling corn meal on the ground, or by dragging a stick through the beach sand. There is something timeless about walking this prehistoric pattern, regardless of the crowds and traffic that may be nearby.

Here in Northern California alone, there are several public labyrinths that receive a steady stream of visitors. Grace Cathedral in San Francisco has a beautiful outdoor labyrinth inset into a public terrazzo patio. I have gone there with friends several times, sometimes late at night when no one else is around, to walk the sacred pattern under the stars, with the sleeping city all around us and the fresh ocean air clearing our minds and spirits.

Across the Bay in the Berkeley Hills, a local artist took it upon herself to create a stunning labyrinth in a public park. Because “Mazzariello’s Maze” is not officially supported by the Sibley Regional Park, locals formed a Friends of the Labyrinth group to help maintain the site for all.

Accessing this labyrinth involves following an unmarked trail for almost a mile, which is more effort than most people want to put into their labyrinth pilgrimage. For less ambulatory folks, there is a labyrinth at a nearby middle school, and at medical centers and churches throughout the Bay Area.

But this is not a movement that is limited to California. While the Bay Area has a wonderful online guide to local labyrinths, there is also a World-Wide Labyrinth Locator that guides labyrinth tourists from Georgia to Ohio, Wyoming to Baton Rouge. Communities that create local labyrinths can also add their own entries to the list.

With membership in most churches declining and many individuals choosing to follow their own path to spirituality, public labyrinths can become a low-cost, low-maintenance destination spot for any town that wants to attract a steady stream of contemplative tourists. And with the great need for peace of mind and rejuvenation in troubled times, labyrinth tourism may be just beginning.

Anne Hill, D.Min., is available to consult, design, and lead labyrinth tours and pilgrimages throughout Northern California. This article was originally published at the Huffington Post.

If you have ever wondered where to find a worthy compendium of these stories, with footnotes and resources for further investigation, look no further than Robert Moss’s new book The Secret History of Dreaming. Not only is this a fascinating book of historical treasures, it is also a great read. Moss is a consummate storyteller, and once you’ve read his version of Joan of Arc as a tree seer, you will soon want to hurry forward and learn more about the incredibly detailed, accurate dreams that guided Harriet Tubman on her rescue missions.

From then it is just a short hop to Mark Twain’s prophetic dreams and visions, which informed his comedy but gave his life a tragic cast. Physicist Wolfgang Pauli’s wild dreams, featured by Jung in his book Psychology and Alchemy, bleed into the waking life synchronicities of this eccentric genius. And then there are Winston Churchill’s time machines, and the young 15th century noblewoman Lucrecia de León, the “dream spy” of Madrid.

This book reads like historical fiction, and for good reason. Before he began writing exclusively about dreams and active imagination Robert Moss had a successful career as a fiction writer, most notably with The Firekeeper: A Narrative of the Eastern Frontier (newly re-issued by SUNY Press). His fiction relies heavily on actual or at least plausible events and entanglements, and he is a diligent researcher of historical setting. His writing style in The Secret History of Dreaming may strike some as more imagination than history, but it works quite well for bringing the very real power of dreaming to the attention of a wide audience.

Moss calls his particular method of fleshing out the bones of a story “dream archaeology.” It involves being able “to read all the clues from a scene in another time, enter that scene, and then bring back new discoveries that will stand up to cross-examination.” After doing a thorough study of all related historical sources and getting a feel for the details of the period and culture, the dream archaeologist uses some rather familiar tools to fill in the gaps of his knowledge:

Through the arts of conscious dream travel, active imagination, and “mutual visioning,” we can enter other times and gain firsthand knowledge of conditions there that we can then research and verify…. We can reclaim the best of ancient traditions and rituals in authentic, helpful, and timely ways.

Here lies the crux of not only Moss’s method of storytelling, but his convictions about the importance of dreaming to human evolution as well as his vision of the future of dreaming. Moss is adamant that “dreaming is a vital understory in the human odyssey,” and he makes the case quite well, citing cross-cultural examples throughout history where dreaming has been both a survival skill and an integral part of daily life.

I am in agreement with Moss that we can make much better use of our dreams today: to help us weather societal, familial and personal crises, be alerted to health issues before they become serious, and communicate with loved ones near and far, alive and dead. (To name just a few possibilities.) His previous books on dreaming lay out some useful techniques and guidelines for pursuing this kind of work, developing one’s intuition and learning how to both ask questions and receive answers from the web of energy all around us, including our dreams.

He never fully explains what he hopes to achieve through these methods of creative scrying, however. In his epilogue on “The Future History of Dreaming,” Moss gets specific about the necessary “return of the seer,” as he puts it. He outlines three basic types of seer: the receivers, the travelers, and the far-seers. Receivers are mediums and empaths, receiving information, filtering it, and passing it on. Travelers engage in out of body experiences and soul journeys. Far-seers widen their inner sight and use the instantaneous power of thought to be everywhere at once, yet never leaving the body.

But to what end? How will a world filled with psychic/shamanic adepts be fundamentally better, or even different, than the world we have today? The one thing I never hear Robert Moss admit in his almost uniformly optimistic vision is that people are people. He may have traveled back to ancient Greece and found that “from the moment a pilgrim entered an Asklepian temple, he was given constant encouragement to believe that healing was available and to abandon old mental habits and self-defeating attitudes.” But I went there too, and found that not everyone in the dream priesthood was great at what they did. And while some miraculous healings did take place, there was also a powerful social expectation that pilgrims would declare themselves healed, even if they weren’t.

The dirty little secret of the human potential movement is that even if we all develop to our fullest potential, our society will still not be perfect. Theocracy is just an election away, as we have seen quite recently. And as important (and rare) as true dreamers and healers are, it is just as important for a healthy, just society to have people who can establish good public policy and make the trains run on time.

I personally am quite relieved that I don’t live in ancient Greece, or any number of dream-centered tribal societies. I want to live in a functioning democracy where women and men have equal rights, and I also want strong dreamers to aid and support the quality of life for all. I don’t see any clear way to get there from Robert Moss’s vision, partly because the dreamers he talks about were mostly outsiders. This may in fact be the “natural” social position for the vast majority of those who take up the call and develop their own capacity to dream.

And so, those of us who help people pay attention to their dreams are faced with a conundrum: How do we encourage people to explore the healing, liberating, transformational power of dreaming consciousness, while at the same time remaining realistic about the limits of change? How do we strive for the best result while being unattached to outcome? And most crucially, how can dreaming support the overall social goals to which we aspire? These are questions I would love to hear Moss respond to.

Robert Moss writes with unflagging optimism and energy, spinning flax into gold as he weaves his web of stories, reassuring the reader at every turn that the future of dreaming is bright. I have had that dream too, and I believe it. Yet it doesn’t answer all my questions.

I am not a big fan of relationship advice columns, but I do have a suggestion for everyone who is currently in a relationship or thinking of having one in the future. If you share a bed with someone at night, try sharing your dreams with each other in the morning, too.

Think about it: you have both gotten up early, it’s time to make some coffee and head off to work. The night before was so special (for reasons I don’t have to go into here), and yet as you glance across the table at your partner you can’t think of a single thing to say that doesn’t involve money, schedules, or what to cook for dinner. There has got to be something more interesting, more romantic even, to start the day off with.

Then you remember a little snippet of a dream from the night before. The two of you were off to see a movie, and bumped into an old college roommate. The meeting was brief, your old friend was happy to meet your new sweetie, and that was the end of the dream.

We tend to worry that every dream is filled with Freudian intrigue, that it reflects badly on us somehow, and betrays dark secrets we don’t even know we have. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The dreams we have at the start of a new relationship can tell us a lot about how we’re coping with the changes in our life, and what our hopes and fears are for the relationship. These are all very good things to communicate with the other person. And chances are they have had some recent dreams that say something about what they think they’ve gotten into, too.

Here are a couple tips for sharing your dreams with that special someone. And please note: this is not something that only benefits people in new relationships. The longer you have been together, the more you will show up in each other’s dreams, so it is always useful to see how that is going for both of you.

• Just share the dream. Treat your dreams like stories, or like windows into how your subconscious is integrating all your thoughts and feelings from yesterday, last week, a year ago, and way back when you were 12. Don’t expect them to make sense, just enjoy the opportunity to have a little glimpse into each other’s private world.

• Be an ally, not an analyst. There is nothing worse than sharing a funny little dream and instead of having a supportive ear, hearing your beloved say, “Wow, you really need to work things out with that client, don’t you?” Sometimes dreams have obvious meanings and messages. If so, let the dreamer have first crack at stating it.

• Ask great questions, and listen. Follow the advice of dreamworker Robert Moss, and ask questions such as, “How did you feel when you woke up?” or “Do you recognize anyone in the dream?” My current favorite question is, “If you could ask one thing about the dream itself, what would you want to know?”

• Have fun, but take it seriously. Every now and then, an amazing dream pops up. By sharing your dreams, you may find that your dreams become clearer and more profound. If so, take it as a gift and thank your partner for helping you follow your dreams more closely. Then ask him gently if he could stop taking all the damn covers in the middle of the night.

This article was originally published in the Huffington Post.

None of us were experts. We had read one book about starting dream groups, Jeremy Taylor’s excellent Where People Fly and Water Runs Uphill. Some of us had knowledge of myths and symbols, a couple of us had a strong spiritual orientation, none of us knew much about psychology. What we did in the beginning could be described as hunt-and-peck dreamwork: every so often we had an insight into a dream, but mostly it took a very long time to find any meaning at all in our dreams.

Then an amazing thing happened. Those rare moments of illumination began affecting us so deeply that they changed our life paths. One of us had dreams which spurred her to become a teacher. Another started taking herself seriously as an artist. My dreams guided me to become a dream consultant. Dreams have helped us write novels, deal with family crises, find jobs, make decisions about where to move, avert health emergencies, and much more. After 16 years we all know a great deal about dreams now, and find it hard to imagine life without our precious weekly meetings.

Starting a dream group is quite simple and requires no formal training. By following a few simple guidelines, you and 3-4 friends can start your own group and begin to reap some of the benefits of regular dream sharing.

1) Dream groups vary widely in structure and schedule. Once you have a core group of people, decide how often you want to meet. Some groups meet every week for around 2 hours, while others meet once a month for a longer session. With more time you can work on more dreams, but shorter, more frequent meetings give the group a consistency that deepens your work.

2) Decide whether you want to hire someone experienced to lead the group, or go it alone. Many groups pay a dream consultant to sit in with the group once a year and contribute ideas, suggestions, and different points of view. This can provided a much-needed boost of inspiration.

3) Invest in a couple dream books or symbol dictionaries. I have some favorites, but the key is to find what works for you, and not to rely on just one resource.

4) Give your new group a limited lifespan. With just 2-3 months of meetings, you will know whether the group is a good mix of personalities and styles. If conflicts come up, instead of taking all the group’s time to address the issues you can simply let the term expire and the group dissolve. Then try again with a new, modified group and see if it is successful. Once you have found the right chemistry, take a chance and make it an ongoing group!

5) Go for open-minded, rather than like-minded, people. Diversity of opinion and belief is beneficial in dreamwork, as it is often the outlying perspective that produces the greatest “aha” moments in a dream. However, make sure that there is mutual respect for opposing viewpoints. Dreams always bring up our shadow prejudices, and with the support of an open-minded group, we can all make great strides in transforming these limiting viewpoints.

6) Have fun. When in doubt, focus on the beauty of a dream. Remember the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, and before saying anything about another person’s dream ask yourself, “Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?” The compassion and awareness we cultivate through working on other people’s dreams will come back to us many times over as we consider our own dreams. In the end, that is the real treasure of this simple, yet infinitely complex and rewarding practice.

This article was originally published in the Huffington Post.

Back in October I was interviewed by my friend, author Thorn Coyle on her show, Elemental Castings. We talked about dreams, water, the dark, rhythm, and Aikido, among other things. It was a great conversation, and the complete hour-long show can be downloaded here.

In April, I was interviewed by Dr. David Van Nuys of Shrink Rap Radio. Our wide-ranging conversation about nightmares—and, toward the end, children’s nightmares specifically—makes for fascinating listening. Listen online or download the podcast here.

This past weekend an interview with me was aired on Paradigms, a new show about visions of a viable future. The entire show, featuring live music as well as the interview, is available for listening here. I will also post an edited version of just my conversation with the show’s host Baruch, very soon in my Audio Clips.

Finally, an article about me appeared in the SF Martial Arts Examiner, written by Paul Rest. Being a student of aikido, the martial art of non-violence gives me a unique outlook on the work of dreams. Read the profile here.

There is another way of dealing with bad dreams, one that has a much happier ending. With just a little effort, we can transform those frightening scenes into ones of power and strength. As we learn to tap into the hidden ally within every nightmare image, we discover that many things once fearful to us can become sources of joy and freedom.

I had my first intimation of this concept several years ago, at a dream conference in Berkeley. The wonderful writer and scholar of world religions Huston Smith was speaking there on Buddhism, dreams, and higher states of consciousness.

As Smith talked about how the path to enlightenment is not something we can grasp with the rational mind, someone asked him why we have nightmares. Smith took a moment, then declared that he had no idea why our dreams shock us so. But back in my seat, I had a sudden realization about the nature of nightmares.

Huston Smith had just been telling us the story of Siddhartha, who sits under the Bodhi Tree and vows not to leave his meditation until he had achieved enlightenment. Determined to stop this enterprising human, the chief of demons immediately sends a swarm of smaller demons to distract the Buddha from his mission.

The demons plague Siddhartha with visions of death and destruction, suffering and bloodshed. But with each one the Buddha simply deepens his meditation, by recognizing the visions for what they were: just demons, bent on distracting him. The chief of demons kept sending out stronger and stronger demons (the strongest apparently being visions of beautiful, seductive women, but that’s another story); the Buddha saw through each of them and his meditation continued to deepen. Finally the chief of demons himself emerged to shake Siddhartha, but the Buddha saw through this ultimate challenge as well, and in doing so broke the cycle of suffering and became enlightened.

At that moment during Huston Smith’s talk, I realized that nightmares were like demons that try to distract us from our mission of gaining self-awareness through dreams. I reasoned that maybe if we could face our nightmares without fear, they would instead become our allies and we would find our awareness increased.

Later on at the conference, I happened to meet Professor Smith in the hallway. I reminded him of the audience member’s question, and told him the answer that had suggested itself to me. In his gracious manner he looked surprised, then delighted, and said that it was very likely so. He thanked me for telling him, and we parted.

That may have been the moment when the seed was planted for writing my new book What To Do When Dreams Go Bad. Since then, I have helped many people transform their frightening dream images into powerful dream allies.

My latest opportunity to spread the word about nightmares’ creative potential is here, in a recent interview on Shrink Rap Radio. Listen to my whole hour-long conversation with Dr. David Van Nuys, or download the podcast on iTunes. This may be the lucky day when your nightmares turn to allies, too!

This piece was originally published on the Huffington Post.

As it happens, last month I did a fair amount of traveling, leading dream workshops and selling copies of my new book. Maybe because of my busy schedule, or maybe due to jet lag, I tended to wake an hour or two earlier than I needed to in the morning. As I lay in bed hoping to get back to sleep, often I would drift into a dream and bring a little lucid awareness with me. The following dream was like that:

I’ve got a pole for pole vaulting, and can do all these tricks with it. It’s great, I can twirl and leap all across the landscape, and I’ve figured out how to make it almost a part of my body. The feeling is exhilarating. Then I notice that I assume the dream will end poorly, so I start imagining not quite reaching my goal, or reaching it but messing up toward the end. And it hits me: why do I need to assume that? Isn’t it just as likely that with my strength I will cross the finish line in great shape? So I decide to change the story in mid-flight, and it works. Crossing a huge expanse, I get from one side to the other without falling or getting weak.

This dream was a huge aha for me, first because I had been worried that I might get sick on my trip. But I felt good, was eating well, getting plenty of sleep, and the workshops were going great. Why would I keep worrying about getting sick?

More than anything, the dream made me aware of that voice in my head which does assume the worst, is always bracing for at least mild failure, and actually serves to weaken me when things are going just fine. By way of antidote, the dream seemed to suggest that simply focusing on what I knew how to do and keeping my mind on my task was enough to ensure that I could be successful.

The second aha for me was in the dream’s unequivocal opinion that I was strong and skilled enough to do this pole vaulting. There was never a moment when I felt physically in jeopardy or fatigued. It was simply a trick of my mind that created the opening for missteps and falls.

I woke up feeling great, and resolved to stop worrying about what might go wrong on my trip. I also began paying attention to see whether that sabotaging voice came up in other situations. No surprise, it was a near-constant chatter in the background no matter what I was doing.

It took flying far away from home to get enough distance to be able to distinguish that message and to see clearly that I could change it. When I got home I continued to think about the dream and how I could keep practicing this new awareness. I realized that another realm where I am constantly afraid of injury is in fact physical exercise.

I have been practicing aikido now for over 10 years, and view earning a black belt 5 years ago as a huge accomplishment, more important in a way than any degree or initiation I have received. But the art is very strenuous, and I kept re-injuring my knee and shoulder. Last summer I realized that I would not be able to continue training at the level I wanted unless I did more physical conditioning in addition to the aikido.

I started doing hot yoga one or two times a week, something I’d done infrequently in the past. This is another strenuous activity, but one that felt better for my knee than the physical therapy exercises I’d been doing. Intuitively, I felt that I could strengthen those weak points while actually healing the original injuries if I kept at this practice for long enough.

Fast-forward to a couple weeks ago, back from the last of two overseas trips. I had eaten too well, it turns out, and nothing fit quite right anymore. The obvious solution was to work out more and shed those Cadbury pounds. That’s when I realized that I also needed to completely shift my perspective on physical training.

Always in the back of my mind I had thought of yoga as something I did to get strong enough to go back to aikido. But there was nobody forcing me back to the dojo. I could in fact follow whatever path felt best for my body—I could just pursue yoga and let the aikido go for now.

Finally, I realized that the dream was showing me my needless fear of getting into great shape. I was in good enough shape, but why not let my body get as strong and flexible as it wanted to be? The dream felt almost like a hunger for that kind of physical mastery. What is more, unlike in aikido, I was toned enough and familiar enough with this style of yoga so that I could embark on more intensive training without fear of injury. All I needed to do was pay attention and keep focused on ground, breath, extension.

So here I am, never having thought of myself as particularly athletic. And yet I go in there and sweat with the best of them, 4 or 5 times a week. All the Cadbury is staying put for now, but that is not really my goal. I want to feel more like that pole vaulter, energized and confident, crossing the landscape with grace and skill, and landing just so.

This piece originally appeared on the Blog o’ Gnosis.

What I find interesting here as a dreamworker is that in her final summary of the dream, she says that she blew the interview with General Petraeus. But taking each element of the dream individually, it sounds as though the interview itself went well — in fact, it was a great example of being in the moment and being mentally prepared for a sudden opportunity. She had questions, he had answers, and the spontaneous conversation went fine.

What didn’t go well in the dream were the structural things that broadcasters have to have in place: note pad, schedules, and, most importantly, a camera rolling. So if this were my dream I would say that there is a tension between what I feel eminently able to do, and the way I have to do it. Maybe my exuberance is not a great fit for the media role I now have, or maybe the dream is reminding me to slow down and make sure I have all the logistics taken care of before I just sit down and talk to someone off the cuff.

Either way, the dream highlights some universal concerns that arise in our anxiety dreams: problems with communication, preparedness, forgetting important details, and the pressure we face being professionals while still being ourselves. And as Clara Jeffery pointed out, the good news in this dream is that at least she wasn’t interviewing General Petraeus naked.

This originally appeared on the Huffington Post.

Midway through a sound sleep you suddenly wake up, heart pounding and head filled with horrible nightmare images. Instantly wide awake, you replay the bad dream over and over, wondering what it means and why it had to happen to you. While everyone else is asleep, rest eludes you as a thousand fears ricochet through your mind. What do you do next?

Welcome to the world of nightmares. Everyone has them, though they usually become less frequent as we age. But no matter how old we are, we can still experience that feeling of helplessness when something happens in a dream that is just so wrong. And we wonder, is it us? Did we do something wrong? Could we prevent something bad from happening in the future if only we understood the dream?

Most of us go back and forth between thinking about how to interpret the dream and how to respond to it. If it is a dream of an intruder getting into our house, we naturally will go around and check all the locks and windows. If it’s a dream about a car crash the logical thing to do is have our car looked at by a mechanic, just to be safe. But once we attend to the literal concerns the dream raises, things get trickier. In most cases, we are left with the uneasy feeling that maybe we aren’t “getting” a more important, symbolic message that the dream is trying to communicate.

This tricky ground is the subject of my brand new book, What To Do When Dreams Go Bad: A Practical Guide to Nightmares. Prompted by a nightmare of my own last year, I investigated many different ways to understand and work with nightmares. The result is a book that covers both science and spirit, presenting practical as well as esoteric techniques for integrating the powerful messages of our disturbing dreams.

Nightmares are a rich source of creative ideas for novelists and composers as well as scientists and inventors. Nightmares can come to warn us of impending health problems and conflicts that can be avoided if we start paying attention right now. They tell us when our lives are out of balance, and show us our buried emotions and ambitions so that we face our fears and in so doing gain wisdom and maturity.

I believe that we ignore nightmares at our peril, but I am also in favor of having a little fun when things get really serious, so the book is laced with humor and compassion for our foibles and failings. Nightmares are the means by which our psyches deliver urgent information from the depths of the unconscious into our daytime awareness. Most importantly, this can include valuable tips about where to go and what to do when we are most in need of direction and guidance. And in the difficult downturn we are experiencing right now, we need access to all the hidden stores of wisdom we can get.

Because this book is self-published, I am actively pursuing all leads for publicity, interviews, author appearances and reviews. If you have a suggestion that might help, please drop me a line in the comments, or on my website. What To Do When Dreams Go Bad is currently available through amazon.com, Serpentine Music & Books, and several independent bookstores in the Bay Area.

It is a great feeling to complete a huge project like writing a book, but I never would have even begun were it not for a dream that scared me out of my wits. Above all, I encourage everyone to be curious about bad dreams, not fearful. When we stay in those early feelings of fear, we don’t allow ourselves a full range of motion in responding to the dream. But when we let curiosity guide us, the result is a richer, more satisfying life filled with accomplishments that most people only dream of. 

This piece was originally published on the Huffington Post.

As a dreamworker and yoga student myself, I have developed a couple different methods to merge the two disciplines. The main one I use came about during a restorative yoga session four years ago. I’d recently had a very powerful dream in which there was a strange spinning object in the sky — almost a planet, maybe a moon or a satellite, but in the end I had no idea what it was. It was a pivotal piece of the dream, yet try as I might I couldn’t arrive at its meaning using symbolic associations.

As I lay there relaxing on the mat, I held the picture of the spinning object in my mind. With each breath I allowed the image to move through my energy body, almost like passing a jigsaw piece very slowly over a half-finished puzzle to see where the perfect fit lies.

In a yoga asana, once we are in a pose we relax and settle into it, noticing any places of strain. We send our breath to loosen up any tightness and let the energy flow freely from our feet through legs, pelvis, torso, arms, hands, and head. As I let the image of the spinning object settle more fully into my body, I felt it come slowly to rest in my heart. Suddenly, something clicked. The puzzle piece fell into place and I realized the importance of the image: it was a picture of all the different influences — some natural, some man-made — spinning through my heart as I prepared to make an important life decision.

That was the first time I understood how valuable a somatic practice is to the interpretation of dreams. Very often dreams come with information about how our life choices affect our physical health. The mind alone is not always enough to grasp the full meaning of these symbols and images — we need to use the body itself to feel into them as though they held the resonance of a yoga asana.

Using dream images as though they were yogic poses has deepened my regular yoga practice. I move into each asana now as though it were a brand new posture, one which may unfold in surprising ways if I only stay curious and open-minded, and follow my breath. And now that I am better at entering deeply relaxed states in general, I can do my somatic meditation with dream symbols anytime I choose, whether on the mat or off.

Of course, there are times when we just want to think about a dream symbol until we figure it out, and times when we just want to move through our yoga routine to get a good morning workout. There is no single right way to approach dreams, yoga, or any spiritual practice for that matter. But there is always the possibility of deepening our practice, whatever it is, and using insights from one to illuminate our path in fruitful, unexpected ways. And if those rewards are truly possible, doesn’t it make sense to aim high?

This piece first appeared on the Huffington Post.

Tuning into this natural process lets us make conscious use of these dream insights. We can even ask our dreams for clarification and guidance on the big issues we face. And because this period of big dreaming comes at a time when we are already gathering with family and friends, there is the added opportunity to share this winter gift with those we love. Whether you are a lone wolf or a party animal this holiday season, here are some great ways to dream big this winter.

1. Write a letter to your dreams. No, dreams don’t come from the North Pole, but they do respond to our questions and concerns. Tell your dreams what you want, and be specific. What do you need to let go of from the old year? What do you want more of in the year to come? Then ask your dreams to help by showing you where the best opportunities lie, and what other factors you may be overlooking.

2. Create a special dream journal. Any notebook can be personalized by creating a collage on the cover that conveys your special dream requests. Focus on what you want to manifest and let your fingers do the walking through those old magazines, picking out images and placing them just so. Feel free to include affirmations, quotes, and parts of your dream letter in the design. Once you have glued it all down, cover the whole thing with clear contact paper so it will last, a sturdy reminder of your new dreaming cycle.

3. Give yourself time to dream big. The best way to remember dreams is after a full night’s sleep, so take some time during these long nights to catch up on sleep. If you are running a big sleep deficit it may take a few days to feel completely rested and refreshed. Let your body rejuvenate with extra sleep over the holidays, and be ready to write down all the dreams you remember.

4. Spend a silent night with your dreams. Everyone needs time to go inward, so plan to set aside one quiet evening without television or computers. Eat a good meal, light candles, take a long bath, whatever it takes to relax and make a complete break with your normal routine. Focus on your dream intention before bed, by reading aloud your dream letter, or writing directly in your dream journal. Remember to keep your journal and pen (or a small voice recorder) handy, so that when dreams come in the night you can easily write them down.

5. Throw a winter dream slumber party. This is the perfect season to sink into the Dreamtime, and it’s even better when shared with a handful of close friends. Spend the evening sharing your hopes and fears for the new year, then have an old-fashioned sleepover. Create sacred space, call in your spirit allies, and the Guardians of sleep and dreams. Hand out penlights, and make sure everyone has a journal to write down their dreams, as well as a comfy place to sleep. In the morning, keep silence until everyone has written down the dreams they remember. Thank the spirits who have watched over you, and over a leisurely breakfast, share your dreams with each other.

6. Make dream charms at a holiday gathering. If you already have an event planned and want to include a fun, fragrant, and meaningful craft project, let people create dream charms to bring home with them. All you need are bowls of dried herbs like lavender, rose petals, mugwort, chamomile, and lemon balm, small strips of paper to write on, and some simple drawstring bags. Invite your guests to write down dream questions or affirmations they want to remember each night on going to sleep. Place the strips in a bag, fill it with herbs, and draw it tightly closed. Then keep the dream pillow by your bed, and let the herbal fragrance remind you of your wishes, sending you sweet dreams.

7. Bring in the hired help. Do your dreams have you stumped? It could be time to call for reinforcements, and let a dream consultant (Hey! Over here!) help you unravel those big dream messages. Even a 15 or 30 minute phone conversation can be enough to jump-start your own dream insights. Better yet, hire a dream expert for your next holiday gathering or office party, and give everyone the chance to understand their dream messages this winter.

8. Practice mental yoga with those puzzling dream images. You may already have some big dreams you are pondering. If so, make time for a close encounter with any dream character you want to understand better. Get comfortable and relax, breathing deeply while holding the character in your mind’s eye. Notice every detail: age, size, facial expressions, attitudes, motivations, emotions. Now gradually bring that image closer and let the character meld with you. How does it feel to take its stance, to say the same words? Is there a time in your waking life that you feel this way, or act this way? Spend as much time exploring the character as you need, then thank it, see the character withdraw from you, and let the image go.

9. Look for the beauty in dreams. Self-help doesn’t always mean self-criticism. This winter season, start by noticing all the good things about your dream first. Does it take place on a sunny day? Do you complete a task you set out to do? When you ask for help, does it come? Even if some things go wrong in the dream, that does not mean that all is lost. Sometimes just counting our blessings more often, in dreams as well as in life, allows our luck to change.

10. If at first you don’t receive, try again. Dreams can be elusive, especially if we’re not used to working with them. But don’t take no for an answer. If your dreams are confusing, write them down anyway, then re-state your intention the next night. And the night after that, if necessary. Many people receive very clear dream messages after 3-5 nights of focused dreaming.

Remember: dreams are a natural resource, one that grows in strength as we pay more attention to it. And as we say goodbye to this momentous year, may our winter dreams reveal hidden riches waiting for us in the year to come. As the season turns and the days begin to grow longer, may all our dream fields bear full fruit.

This piece first appeared on the Huffington Post.

Both of these can be seen as crossroads dreams: each dreamer is in an untenable situation, and something must change in order for them to move ahead. Which path will they choose? Will the woman reaffirm her goals in spite of her fear, or will she decide she really is lost and look for new life direction? Will the man keep plugging away with a difficult work situation, or will he decide that his superior attitude is the real problem?

Using dreams for personal insight and career guidance is becoming increasingly popular, with the rise in dream groups and peer-based dream consulting. In these forums, it is up to each of us to determine what is true about our own dreams. Others may offer their interpretations, but there is no external authority telling us what the dream means. The dreamer learns to trust his or her own intuition, which in the end is our most precious resource.

But there are other places dreams can take us, beyond the level of our daily concerns and emotional well-being. They can bring us face to face with the Sacred. When this happens, we instantly move beyond thinking about what the dream means, and drop into a felt sense of something completely extraordinary. It is as if we have unwrapped all the layers of gift paper in the box and finally gotten down to the prize inside: the reminder that we are blessed, and loved, and that all is well.

Most people get uncomfortable talking about the Sacred. To begin with, no one even agrees what to call it: the Divine, Spirit, the Cosmos, God, Goddess, the Numinous. And from there, the questions get even harder to answer. Is it an external force or an internal grace? Are we referring to a He or a She, an androgynous Being, or the vast and intelligent Universe itself?

But all our questioning obscures the fact that no matter what we call it, or whether we even believe in it, some larger Knowing pops up in dreams all the time. The real question is, how do we relate to it once it appears?

I look for Divinity first in any part of the dream that is described as especially beautiful. Maybe the woman wandering around lost at summer camp mentions passing by a beautiful waterfall. When asked for more detail, she describes its mossy banks, the water that is as clear as glass, the air so sweet she doesn’t ever want to leave. Stepping into this hidden grotto, she briefly forgets about her hunger and loneliness, and feels a deep sense of peace.

This may have been just a momentary respite in an otherwise difficult dream. But allowing herself to pause here, to breathe deeply that sweet air, to sit on the cool, damp ground and listen to the water cascade over the rocks, she accepts the true gift of the dream: a moment out of time, where everything is as it should be.

A moment of grace puts everything into its proper perspective. Suddenly the flight through the woods, and the difficult life decisions she faces, are counterbalanced by knowing that she will be okay, no matter what happens.

And what about the man on horseback? His dream was very brief, and in dream fragments such as this every symbol carries extra weight. In this dream I was struck by the image of the horse. He described it as very large and powerful, intelligent and beautiful. Sitting on its back, he felt it was the kind of horse that he could ride to the ends of the earth and it would barely be winded.

In other words it was a magical steed, an immortal, and a visceral reminder of the ancient stories of virtue and purpose that were playing out in his life. The white horse reminded him that he was not alone in his struggles, that his strength was a gift, and that he could trust his instincts to guide him at every turn.

In the end, encountering the Divine in dreams is not just about radiant beings of golden light descending from on high — though it certainly can be. I find the Divine more often in those moments when we feel part of something much bigger than ourselves, when beauty appears unbidden and the ordinary becomes luminous. In these rare and precious encounters, we are moved beyond our human struggles and come face to face with the wonder and Mystery that is life.

This piece first appeared on the Huffington Post.

I read from the dream reports on my radio show more than once, because there was something fascinating about viewing the election, and the cultural mood, in terms of what ordinary people all over were dreaming about the candidates. They begged the question: What do dreams reveal? Do they reveal truths about people and events, or do they ultimately reveal more about ourselves?

My colleague Kelly Bulkeley had also been collecting election dreams and looking for patterns in how conservative and liberal Americans dream. After I blogged about a dream I’d had of Obama, Kelly noted that he had been getting a lot of assassination dreams from people. He wondered whether these reflected the fear that the heightened idealism of hope and change in this country would also stir up the dangerous shadow elements of our culture.

This was mid-October, when the McCain/Palin campaign was all about prodding the slumbering beast of racial hatred, the economy was in free-fall, and the national intensity-o-meter was cranked up to eleven, all the time. I was not an over-the-top Obama supporter, but thought that he was running an excellent campaign and had the potential to be a very good president. I thought about Kelly’s comment long and hard. Were we fated to re-enact the dreadful myth of the hero who dies too young, of promise left unfulfilled, or was there a chance that a different story could emerge? Could Obama be less like a Kennedy and more like, say, a Mandela?

That night I had a very short, dream. In it, a whole group of us were in the White House as part of a new government. We were policy people, legislators, cabinet and staff members all working together, making decisions about how to run the country. At the same time we were consciously putting on a play, re-enacting a myth. Every one of us had a different part, and Obama was playing the role of Frodo.

I have never been good at predicting events — I can’t even choose the quickest line at the grocery store — but I had a good feeling on waking from this dream. To the degree that the dream might reflect external events, it seemed to be reinforcing the notion first of all that Obama would survive, and succeed at the challenge he had set for himself. Second, it emphasized the importance of the Fellowship to his success. As is so often the case, a leader is only as good as the team around him — and because I was part of that group, that meant that his team was not just the government but everybody.

Frodo is a reluctant hero in the Lord of the Rings , but the important thing is that he wins. He destroys the Ring, in part because he is such an unlikely candidate to do the job. He lives a long life, although on his journey he takes a hit which pains him long after the battle is won. As cultural myths go, I was happy that my dream had provided this one as a viable alternative to the tragic one that was foremost in so many people’s minds.

On election night I watched MSNBC as the returns came in. When the race was called, they interviewed Rep. John Lewis and asked him to reflect on this historic moment in terms of the struggle for civil rights in this country. His voice laden with emotion, he said, "Sometimes I think it was like a drama. We all had roles to play." I thought again of my dream, and how every day as we do the work before us, we too are enacting roles in a larger drama.

Joseph Campbell famously said, "A myth is a public dream, a dream is a private myth." I don’t know whether, in the end, our private dreams can change the myths of our culture, or even predict them. My dream certainly reflects my personal feeling that however it happens, change at that level is possible. But even in the terms of the dream, nothing comes by simply walking around in costume, mouthing lines.

There is real work involved, real decisions on critical issues which need to be made in order for the drama to play out as we hope. With a decent leader finally at the helm, and a nation of people willing to put in the effort, I believe we can surmount the tremendous obstacles which prevent us from being the country we have the potential to be. And I will be casting my vote for this to be true, every night from here on out.

This piece first appeared on the Huffington Post .

Why do some dreams fade into obscurity while others stay lit with neon in our minds for ages? Is one kind more important than the other? Are dreams friend or foe? And what could any of them possibly mean?

These are the questions that I have the good fortune of pondering every day in my work as a writer and dream consultant. Dreams have always fascinated me, ever since as a five-year-old I woke up one morning and informed my mother that while I was sleeping God had told me to swallow a rubber band, so I did. The pained, incredulous look she gave me is forever seared in my mind. I saw it a lot from that day forward.

Fortunately the world has changed significantly since the 1960s, and dreams are enjoying a resurgence of interest around the world. The grassroots dreamwork movement deserves a lot of the credit for this, as do many early authors who insisted that dreams were not just the domain of psychotherapists, but that all of us could glean wisdom from them whether we had specialized training or not. Dreams, in other words, are part of the commons. They are a shared resource, and a means of insight that we all have access to.

There are many different ways to work with dreams, some easily accessible and some highly esoteric. At their root, however, the best dreamwork methods all encourage us to trust our inner wisdom. After all, dreams come to us unbidden every night, like water rising from a spring. Their source is within us, somewhere beyond the gate where our conscious mind ends and the deeper processing of our unconscious begins.

Touching that deep spring of guidance, trusting dreams and learning to discern their messages, is the subject of this blog. In future posts I will share stories of some remarkable dreams I have met, and how working with them can help us in every aspect of our lives. Before we can reap the benefits of our dreams, however, we need to learn to listen to them.

Listening to dreams takes intention. With all the things we need to do each day to keep our families going and keep the money flowing in, it can feel like a luxury to take five minutes before getting up in the morning to lie still, recall the dream we were just having, and write it down. We can strengthen that intention by keeping a notebook and pen (or mini voice recorder) next to our bed, and saying an affirmation before going to sleep that "tonight I will remember my dreams."

Just like learning to throw a football or play a musical instrument, recalling dreams takes practice. Some of us have an easier time at it than others, but that doesn’t mean our dreams are inherently more valuable than anyone else’s. In fact, even the briefest, most nonsensical dream fragments can yield significant insights–sometimes even more than epic dream adventures that take upwards of half an hour to transcribe.

The second most important thing we can do to reap the benefits of dreams is to get in the habit of discussing dreams with friends and family. Sometimes just talking out a dream enables us to find the nugget of gold in it. All we need to do as dream listeners is to keep an open mind, listen to the dream story without judgment, and remember that dreams are friend, not foe. Every dream has something creative, useful, and deeply affirming at its core, and just the simple act of telling the dream helps the dreamer discover what that is.

In my case, even though my mother was completely unprepared for her young daughter’s dream report that morning, to her credit she didn’t make any derogatory comments or send me off to a psychiatrist’s couch. Her puzzled reaction in turn made me take a closer look at what I had just experienced. Had it really happened, or had it been a dream? Was there in fact a difference between the two?

I don’t think I had considered the idea before, but that morning set into motion a lifelong curiosity about the terrain between sleeping and waking. The nugget of gold for me in that dream was an early awareness of the gate through which our souls cross as we dream. Beyond it lies riches there for the taking, if we can retrieve them and bring them back with us into the clear light of day.

This piece first appeared on the Huffington Post .

Are you or your employees feeling anxious about jobs, savings, debt, homes? How could you not be, given all the uncertainty in this country today?

I have seen an increasing number of people who are having trouble sleeping because of all the stress, yet are uncomfortable taking prescribed sleep aids because those pharmaceuticals make them groggy during the day. There are effective ways to treat insomnia and other sleep disturbances without medication, and these involve understanding healthy sleep habits and learning to cope with important dream symbols.

I have developed a new series of workplace presentations, from one-hour talks and bag-lunch discussions to half-day or full-day workshops, that help people find workable solutions to their nighttime anxieties, dispel disturbing dreams, and return to deep, restorative sleep.

If you or your company is interested in learning more, I will be happy to send an information packet to you. Just leave a comment or phone me directly in my office. I will be offering these presentations throughout the greater Bay Area in the weeks and months to come, so now is the time get something scheduled before the holidays.

What do these dreams say about Palin as a potential vice president or (heavens forbid) president? What do they say about the dreamers? On a personal level, we know that only the dreamer knows for sure what his or her dream truly means. On a national level, perhaps this is a game best played in hindsight, after a candidate has won or lost and we can point to dream patterns for clues to tell us why.

Meanwhile, for those of you seeking for more patterns in the stars or in ourselves, here is a round-up of astrological predictions for the upcoming election. Does anyone else besides me wish this were over already?

On my weekly radio show, I have recently conducted interviews with medical experts in the field, to increase public understanding of these potentially debilitating conditions and how to treat them. So I was thrilled when a friend called my attention to a new video celebrating the father of sleep medicine research, Dr. William Dement.

Dr. Dement started the Stanford Sleep Clinic, the first of its kind, in 1970. Since then he has been at the forefront of sleep research, publicizing the dangers of daytime drowsiness and how getting a good night’s sleep is critical for our overall state of health and well-being. He developed the first measurements of daytime alertness, and persuaded Congress to appoint a National Committee on Sleep Disorders Research.

Much of what we now know about sleep hygiene comes from the pioneering work of Dr. Dement and his colleagues. Having this information readily available for clients is a great asset to my work as a dream consultant. This video helps put the entire field of sleep research in historical perspective, by highlighting the dynamic personality who set much of it in motion. If you have 15 minutes to spare, I highly recommend watching it.

In his bestselling book Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama deals with the complicated moral and spiritual legacy he inherited from his father. Kelly Bulkeley focuses his article on two of Obama’s dreams included in the book, and comes to some interesting conclusions about the senator’s deeply held values.

For better or worse, both candidates for the U.S. presidency will come under increased scrutiny in the weeks leading up to the general election. While much of that scrutiny will obscure their actual characters and motivations, looking at their dreams is a unique opportunity to gain more revealing insights into how they think and how they are likely to lead.

If John McCain has shared a similarly public set of dreams, I am unaware of them but would love to read them. Whatever your personal convictions about Barack Obama, I encourage you to read Kelly’s article and think about his conclusions. More than that, notice the even-handed way that Kelly deals with this potentially controversial material. Such impartiality, letting the dreams and the dreamers speak for themselves, is not only the mark of a good writer, it is the mark of an excellent dreamworker.

Reisman said that halfway through his stay in space he began dreaming that he was floating and flying around, rather than walking. He likened it to learning a new language, where the moment you first dream in the new language you know you’ve turned a corner. To him, dreaming that he was in zero-gravity was a turning point, showing that he had become accustomed to life in orbit.

Spending 95 days in space is not on my list of things to do in this lifetime, so I was very appreciative of this chance encounter with the dreams of someone who had. If you watch the interview clip, their exchange on dreams (including Reisman admitting that he mostly dreams of being shortstop for the New York Yankees) occurs at about 4:13. Enjoy!

You can create a dream journal out of any blank book or spiral notebook. I am fond of artist’s sketchbooks with acid-free pages. I start a new journal about every six months, and spend an afternoon making a collage cover for it, using images I collect from magazines, cards, giftwrap, and catalogues. 

If this sounds like too much work, most bookstores have a great selection of notebooks with decorative covers, some containing both lined and blank pages. The important thing is to find a book which suits you. For a little lighthearted fun with bad dreams, or for the child in your life, these NightmareSnatcher Journals may be just the thing.

Above all, make this the summer where you give yourself enough sleep to wake fully rested and refreshed. Have a cup of soothing herbal tea after dinner, turn off the computer a half-hour earlier, and let yourself ease gently into sleep. The benefits to your dream life—and to your work the next day—will be well worth it.

My father taught best by approaching every situation with a combination of quiet empathy and dry humor. He had the ability to develop rapport with… see more anybody in a matter of seconds, whether it was a parking lot attendant, a client, a colleague, or his prospective father-in-law. He put people at ease, made them laugh, and created instant friendships that endured for years.

I strive for this kind of relaxed, confident communication in my own life. Whether I am buying groceries, making a business call, or approaching a new group of people, I think of my dad and how he always found a simple comment that bridged difference, soothed conflict, and made everyone feel that they were on the same side.

It was all true, but there was something funny about it: I had written it in past tense, as though my father were no longer alive. True, at 81 he was long since retired, but it seemed odd that I had written it that way. I tried to change it, but a part of me resisted, so I let it be. Four days later, he died suddenly from a massive coronary.

As my family gathers to deal with his death, several of us have shared similar stories—call them premonitions, hunches, intuitions—which gave us a moment of preparation for the shock of his departure. I am reminded of a client of mine who fights fires, and said that in his training he was always instructed to follow his “funny feelings,” which often warned of dangers that weren’t immediately apparent.

I think it is good advice no matter what field we are in. Those moments where we find ourselves compelled to do something that seems odd but feels right, are a chance to connect our inner knowing with our outer actions. They can save our life, and help prepare us for unexpected turns in the road ahead. These hunches can appear in our dreams as well as in waking life. In a year fraught with uncertainties, the good news is that we have more help than we imagine.

My radio show listeners will remember the two or three mornings this Spring when I read some of these fascinating dreams on the air. I indulged in a bit of dream interpretation in order to make connections between the dream and the dreamer’s personal life, and to see if any conclusions could be drawn from these subjective reports as to how well the candidates were succeeding in their efforts to attract voters.

Ms. Heti also asked some national dream experts to study the collected dreams every week, and posted their insights on the “I Dream of Analysis” website. I highly recommend browsing through these essays, to discover not only something about the dreams but about the many ways of understanding dreams.

Now that Barack Obama has won the Democratic presidential nomination, Ms. Heti has announced that she will no longer be compiling dreams, although she promises to keep her sites online. I have just finished reading the final dream analysis, posted by Dr. Bob Van de Castle, who looks separately at the content of both men’s and women’s dreams of the Democratic candidates.

No matter what our professional interests, we can learn a lot about our own attitudes and hidden emotions toward work in dreams. If you are contemplating a career change, or are happy in your position but getting conflicting signals from management, it is always worth checking into your dreams to help uncover the keys that will help you navigate times of uncertainty. And if you are interested in what people really think about your product or service, you might try asking them about their dreams!

Berlin’s essay has spun out some fascinating, if dense, conversations in print, but I was most interested in how Jim Collins has re-focused the hedgehog theme on greatness in business:

A Hedgehog Concept is not a goal to be the best, a strategy to be the best, an intention to be the best, a plan to be the best. It is an understanding of what you can be the best at. The distinction is absolutely crucial.

My dream group has been meeting weekly for 15 years now, and over time we have developed our own set of identifiers for special parts of a dream. One of our chief identifiers is the “hedgehog.” This is the little detail—literally, its first appearance was as a hedgehog in one of our dreams—that we mostly overlook. Then, almost as an afterthought, one of us will say, “what about that hedgehog in the garden?” and that minor detail ends up generating the greatest insights from the dream.

Since that time, we have trained ourselves to be alert for seemingly insignificant dream details which could end up holding the key to much deeper meanings. And now that I know the humble hedgehog also carries weight as a symbol of focus and success in business, I will be all the more sharp-eyed in my search for hedgehogs in the dreams of my corporate clients.

You really can never tell what you might find, whether you are browsing the blogs, or following little hedgehogs through the garden of your dreams.

Bookmark this site for audio clips, ideas, tools and resources to help you make the most of your inner guidance!