A giant bears the message

The THING that appeared at my window

When I pulled up the shades after getting out of bed, I was shocked by the view of a colossus that totally dominated the landscape. It stretched across my entire view of the sky. And it set the tone for the day: the construction of the tower crane in the lot behind our apartment building the day before (which I hadn’t seen yet because I’d returned home in the dark of night) meant that the construction project next door has drastically accelerated.

Every time I passed one of our flat’s  back windows, the crane’s immensity impressed itself upon my consciousness. And an hour later, as I sat contemplating it while sipping coffee in my study, the meaning of its dream-like presence in my environment became clear to me.

But before I share that revelation with you, let me build the foundation (see what I did there?) on three pillars.

The first is a discovery I made about the relationship between dreams and life when I was still only 17 years old, and had only been recording dreams for a few months. I observed that there were occasionally, in my waking life, short stretches of time – an hour, an evening, a day – in which a sequence of events would occur that was pregnant with meaning and/or simply crackling with the energy of synchronicity. It felt like an invisible hand was arranging the people, objects and occurrences in my life to give me a message. And these sequences of events could be worked with and understood in the same way I understood my dreams.

Secondly, this neighboring construction site has been bubbling up in my consciousness for… well… over a year now. The one-family house that stood there was razed to the ground almost two years ago. Then they excavated and poured a foundation this last  autumn before the ground froze.

But in recent months activity there has picked up. And because I am a lover of the cold, I sleep with the windows wide open (all the way through winter). A few weeks ago the noise of the construction activity began disturbing my sleep on those rare mornings when I get to sleep in.

The third pillar is that I have been working my way toward big changes in my life for what seems like forever now. For some years now I’ve been preparing myself for a big life change, but whenever I assessed where I was in my process, it always seemed like I was still disappointingly unprepared for the big transition. “Not yet,” I kept telling myself. The slowly escalating pressure was enough to disturb my sleep and to generally put me on edge. But still not enough to feel like “the time has come.”

And then that Leviathan appeared outside my window. The building process has shifted into high gear.

It is an essential teaching of dreamwork that we must not content ourselves with merely understanding and interpreting our dreams (or any other potent symbolic message from deeper levels of reality). We are being called on to ACT!

To honor this “dream” of the crane bursting forth into my world, and the upsurge in building activity it brings with it, I am committing myself to increase the time and energy I put into building for the coming phase of my life.

The crane is telling me: the time has come!

I've been a baaaaaaaad boy!

In the past few years I've broken into an old woman's house and stolen her jewelry, murdered some people (but don't worry, I hid the bodies well), gone to the office in flowing robes and a long head scarf, killed rats with my bare hands, eaten snakes...

...oh! Did I mention that I did these things in dreams?

And these are only the things I would mention in a blog.

Although dreamworkers are often dazzled with breathtaking scenery or otherworldly music and architecture that still fills them with awe just to remember them, they are also regularly confronted with challenging experiences in their dreams that make them embarrassed, disgusted, frustrated, and a bit frightened to consider who they really are on the deepest levels.

At the same it can make you humble. It's hard to get egoistic and pompous when you know what kind of eery, earthy, animal, decadent, vengeful, cowardly impulses lie beneath your carefully cultivated, civilized surface. Though, to be fair, it is also hard to be completely self-demeaning when you experience the profound beauty and wisdom that lie within you.

You have to take one with the other. But once you realize that dealing with the nasty and scary dreams is often what yields the most reward, with time even those don't seem so nasty and scary anymore.

Have I mentioned that I recently made a business deal with a mafia boss, and that I infiltrated a government office, and...

The priceless gift of disorientation

What planet is this? 

Your eyes open in the middle of the night, and you have no idea where you are. Not only that, you can't even recall who you are and  -- if the disorientation is deep enough -- what country you are in or what century this is. It can be frightening.

And it can be very exciting, and ultimately fulfilling... if you are flexible enough to accept the gift.

Nearly every serious dreamworker I know has experienced this at least once. When you begin cultivating the memory of your dreams by writing them down, contemplating them, and working with them, you build a bridge between two different worlds you live in.

One world is the one tied to the physical body and its five senses. It is tied to a personality associated with the history of this body: where is was born, who its parents are, its state of health, its education, the work it does, etc.

The other world is the one you inhabit when your eyes are closed and your consciousness (which is not your brain!) is freed from the physical body. In this world you wander through realms where space and time are different than they are in the physical world where you are reading these words. And in this non-physical world, you are other people, and you live in different circumstances than the ones you know day to day in the world of your physical body.

The stronger you build the bridge between your dreams and your waking life, the more the two begin to affect each other; that greater You (capitalization intentional) in your dreams begins to seep into this world.

If the transition from the dream world to the waking world is a bit bumpy, or you retain the dream consciousness after you open your eyes in the darkened, quiet room, you can become aware of the fact that the state of mind you are in does not belong to the physical world you've woken up into. And there can be confusion.

But if you relax and accept the experience, it can be wonderful. It is proof that you are more than you believe you are in your more rational, logical, practical moments. It opens a door to a new understanding of who You are.

Accept this gift with gratitude.    

Do you dare look into the crystal ball?

The fist time I saw the crystal ball in the Hall of Gems and Minerals at the Smithsonian Institution when I was 11 years old, I was stunned. I walked around the corner and there it was: 106.75 lbs. (48.5 kg), and 12.9 inches (32.7 cm) in diameter; pure, flawless, natural quartz. I couldn't take my eyes off it.  I circled it, fascinated by it. It was at least a half hour before I could tear myself away.

Of all the things I saw in the three days I spent on the National Mall that summer, the giant crystal made the biggest impression on me.

Part of it was the sublime, pure beauty of the object itself. Part of it was what the object represented: vision! I endeavored to acquire one myself, which wasn't all that easy in a small town in West Virginia in 1972 (no internet e-stores, you know), and the first one I got was acrylic. Not quite the same. Finally, while I was living in California, I found a real quartz crystal ball in a mineral shop somewhere up in the Marble Mountains. It was a pygmy compared to the Smithsonian's crystal, at about six centimeters across. And I've acquired other crystals since. It's kind of a fetish.

Learning to see anything in a crystal is hard work, and requires lots of practice. Frankly, I still haven't had that much success with it. But I'll keep trying. That eleven-year-old boy inside me is still fascinated, and I think of the mother-of-all-crystal-balls that riveted me all those years ago every time I see a crystal.

But vision comes in many ways.

Like it did on that morning in the late winter of 2004. I wrote down a dream after I woke up, and didn't particularly notice it was anything unusual.

In the dream, an old friend of mine runs into me inside the MTI building. (the Hungarian Press Agency, where I worked for ten years). She tells me she needs to take another job, and I would be the perfect replacement for her. It would be in a different division of MTI and it would give me more responsibilities than my current job. I get excited. New possibilities! After I'd thought I was in a dead-end job.

The next day I was walking down the hall at MTI when I ran into an editor from another division in MTI; someone I only knew casually, and barely at that. She whispered to me conspiratorially to come into her office for a minute. After she shut the door she explained that she had been given the authority to set up a new English-language news service within MTI, but one that would be run more along the lines of a Western wire service. She was looking for intelligent, independent-minded native-speaking editors for her staff. She had immediately thought of me.

I remembered the dream.

"So... you're offering me a new job inside of MTI?"

"Yes. Exactly."

I was in awe.

When I went home that evening, I told my wife what had happened that day. When I was finished, I pointed to the desk and said, "My dream journal's been sitting there on the desk since I wrote in it this morning, right"?

"Right."

"Go read the last entry."

She did. When she was finished, she looked up at me with her jaw hanging open.

So, I got my crystal vision after all, even without the ball. The important thing is that I took that peak into the future as a signal from my inner self (my genius, my daemon, my soul, whatever you want to call it) to pay attention when this moment arrived. I was scared by the job she offered me. There were things about it I knew would be a real stretch of my skills. But because I'd had the dream, I felt I was being advised to be brave. I said yes. And saying yes set off a chain of events that led me to more challenging and life expanding situations.

A number of people who have heard this story try to explain it "rationally": I'd heard conversations in the hall subconsciously; my subconscious had made certain logical leaps and figured out what was going to happen. Yadda, yadda, yadda. I just shake my head at their desperate need to deny what was obvious to me. I had seen the future in my dream.

And accepting the dream's inner counsel lit a spark that ignited the flame of transformation in my life. It also brought me some hard tests.

I think one of the main reasons people don't remember their dream is because dreams have the power to accelerate change in your life. It can be scary.

Do you dare look into the crystal ball?

Driving a stake through Freud's heart

Whenever I tell someone I am involved in dreamwork or that I lead a dreamwork circle, their first questions invariably contain some form of the words "interpretation" and/or "analysis", like the following.

"So, what do you people do when you get together?

"Well, we take turns telling dreams to the group, and then...".

"And then you all interpret them, right?"

"Well, no, actually. We avoid interpreting the dream as much as possible. What we do is we work the dream together."

And at that point I often detect a blank stare of cognitive dissonance. I can explain how other members of the group ask questions of the dreamer to help her explore the dream (Do you know a calico cat like the one in your dream? Did you or anyone you know live with one? In the dream you owned an aquarium. How would you describe the kind of people who own aquariums? In the dream you pass by a sleeping dog in the street? Do you think your dream made a visual pun about 'leaving sleeping dogs lie?' "

And I can go on to explain that we might draw pictures of characters, objects or scenes from dreams, or even play "dream theater" in which group members perform someone's dream like a play. The ways in which one can "work" a dream are as endless as the imaginations of the dreamworkers.

But people always get stuck on interpreting. That's what you do with dreams, isn't it? We've all seen the cliche movie and TV show scenes in which someone lying on (or sitting on) a couch tells the psychoanalyst his dream, and the very grave-faced psychoanalyst tells the dreamer (in this case playing the passive role of "the patient") what the dream "means". That's what you're supposed to do, right?

Here's the problem: if you analyze something, you decide that's what it means. And you look no further. You stop exploring. You stop experiencing. Another thing: analysis involves only the rational mind. It leaves out emotions, instincts, intuition, aesthetic sense, and many other dimensions of what makes us human beings. Often it takes months of replaying a dream in one's mind (re-experiencing that mysterious desire or fear or wonder inspired by some part of it) and experimenting with it (making or acquiring an object in the dream; researching characters or places in the dream) before the much desired "aha!" finally occurs. And when that aha occurs, you know it. It's more than the smug intellectual satisfaction of quickly solving a logical puzzle. It is knowledge. YOU KNOW THAT YOU KNOW.

As the old chestnut goes, "If your only tool is a hammer, everything you encounter looks like a nail." It's like that scene in Forrest Gump where Bubba names all the things you can do with shrimp.

But all some people could ever think of doing with shrimp is breading and frying it!

There are so many other tools in the box. There are so many other colors in the paint box. There are so many other instruments in the orchestra. Hammers are good for their purpose. And so is analysis. It has brought us many of the riches our civilization possesses.

But if you really want to learn about your dreams, you need to drive a stake through Uncle Sigmund's heart. It's OK. He'd understand. He'd see it as an Oedipal necessity.

A thousand years of Dream Warriors

This falls into the category of, "I'm not making this stuff up, folks!"

At first I thought combining dreamwork, martial movement and writing practice under one umbrella as "Dream Warrior Training" was a brilliant, revolutionary new idea. But slowly it dawned on me that there have actually been many traditions through history in which trained warriors were expected to also be refined individuals with skills and sensitivities honed by the arts and sciences.

Your average Roman army officer, for example (at least during the Republic period, and the early Empire period)  was a nobleman who'd been raised on poetry. He was familiar with and could recite a catalogue of verse. And very likely he evened penned a few himself occasionally.

But more immediately relevant to the themes of Dream Warrior Training is the lifetime of Chen Tuan (10th century AD). Chen Tuan is revered in Chinese culture as one of the great Taosist sages. He is credited with inventing and/or refining the movements that have come down to us as kung fu (which the Chinese actually call wushu; wu=martial + shu=art) and qigong. He is also famous for being a pioneer and master of "sleep meditation"; a cousin of what is popularly known as "dream yoga" nowadays. Dream yoga is the version of this discipline practiced by Tibetan Buddhist monks.

There is a surprising amount material on the internet about Chen Tuan and his sleep meditation practices, since he was as central a figure to Chinese spiritual history as, say, St Francis or Martin Luther are in the West.

Dream warriors have existed since the beginning of the human race.

Just imagine a prehistoric man sleeping with his companions by the embers of a fire. The stars sparkle over their heads, as he dreams of stalking a magnificent elk with golden antlers. In his dream he quietly raises his spear to shoulder level. Takes aim...   

The dream of the two dojo

When I woke up that morning and realized I'd had the same dream for the third time, I knew this was a deeper life issue.

The dream, entitled "The Two Dojo*" in my dream journal, starts out at a very traditional Japanese aikido school. The decor is spartan, and the only colors are black and white (like the white uniforms and black hakamas of the students). The teacher is painfully strict, and everyone is deadly serious. They practice with stony sober expressions on their faces. Later in the dream I find another school, where the environment is as colorful as a rainbow, and everyone is laughing and having a great time while they train. I instantly feel this is where I'd rather train.

Initially, this recurring dream affected where I chose to train and how I taught aikido classes at my own school. But, as with all "big dreams", there were multiple levels of meaning within it.

Now, almost a quarter of a century later, I realize this dream heralded the path I would follow later in my life once I had conceived of the unique self-development mode I've dubbed Dream Warrior Training. The essential principle behind DWT is that martial training**, dreamwork, and the discipline of journaling (writing for the purpose of exploring the mind), have potent powers for transforming the individual who practices them in combination. My mission is to lead workshops that enable people to benefit from the insights this combined activity can deliver. It is nearly impossible to spend time doing these three disciplines together -- even if only for a day or two -- without coming to some new, life-enhancing realizations.

This is the colorful dojo where everyone laughs and trains joyfully, even though the subject matter is of vital importance.

Whether or not you wish to, some day, participate in this mode of training, the purpose of this blog is to share with you my own insights gained from a life informed by the daily pursuit of these three treasures. If you are interested in dreams, in the wisdom that can be found within our bodies, or in the power to be discovered in using the written word (or any combination of the three), the postings to come in this blog will be just the sort of thing you're looking for.

And though I will engage in a certain amount of curating -- that is: linking and commenting on things I find on the internet -- my well-established blogging habit consists of telling stories relating to my own experience. I know that my own taste in blogs runs to the writers who generate original material, not those who just echo the rest of the cyber noise. I suspect you, astute reader, have similar tastes. If you have a feed reader, perhaps you should subscribe now, to follow this story from the beginning.

Welcome to The Dream Warrior, where insights are inevitable, and laughing is encouraged.  

*A dojo is a place where a spiritual discipline (in Japanese "do", like the Chinese "dao") is practiced.

**specifically the motions and breathing practices that awaken consciousness and enhance one's energies, which I call "martial yoga"