si dawson

Aus­tralian Abo­rig­i­nals have a con­cept they call "Dream­time" (or, more accu­rately "The Dream­ing"). Very loosely speak­ing, this is the infi­nite spir­i­tual cycle that par­al­lels our real­ity, influ­enc­ing & cre­at­ing it. It cre­ated the world we live in, and con­tin­ues to live on, in the present & the future.

Now, what's even more inter­est­ing is the rever­sal they have from how we view real­ity. In the west we believe that our wak­ing life is our "real" (ie, objec­tive) real­ity, whereas our dream­ing life is only sub­jec­tive. Abo­rig­i­nals believe it's the other way around. The Dream­ing is what's objec­tive, and this expe­ri­ence we're liv­ing in is only the sub­jec­tive reflec­tion of that.

A mural thought used to teach Abo­rig­i­nal chil­dren about dream­time. Pic by Damian White

Of course, there's an enor­mous dif­fer­ence between the beliefs of the old­est liv­ing cul­ture on the planet & us as indi­vid­u­als, how­ever, let's push ahead regard­less & see what we can find. Here's a dream I had yesterday:

I'm hang­ing out with friends, in a movie the­atre. Before the show starts there's a come­dian, a magi­cian. He's giv­ing out CDs. He gives them to the row in front, then when he gets to my row, he does a sleight-of-hand trick to not-give them to me, and my friends. He then con­tin­ues with the row behind, giv­ing them out, and across the aisle. Then I notice they're MY CD's he's giv­ing out. A friend comes back to sit down, and her face is cov­ered in some kind of drug or other (I have no idea). She has so much that she doesn't care she's cov­ered in it. Then we all go out driving.

So we end up out in the coun­try. I muck about a bit, then end up on the phone with a good friend of mine from Lon­don. She's com­plain­ing that I'm not work­ing. There are spi­ders & very bizarre, but large, insects all over the floor. Another call comes in. It's my Mum, & she wants to talk to my brother. They talk, then Mum hangs up, which some­how cuts me off from my friend. I ask my brother about it, but he doesn't really know what's going on.

Just for the hell of it, let's segue out of that, and pre­tend we didn't see all the bolded bits.

Now, let's also pre­tend, for the sake of the dis­cus­sion, that there is some rela­tion­ship between our dream­ing life & our wak­ing life.

There are many obvi­ous point­ers to this being true, of course. Our dreams often include peo­ple we know (friends, fam­ily), sit­u­a­tions in our aware­ness while wak­ing (stress at work, rela­tion­ship prob­lems, etc), and the visual metaphors com­monly used have been inter­preted for thou­sands of years to find sat­is­fac­to­rily explana­tory par­al­lels in our wak­ing life.

It's a fairly com­mon, although recent, psy­cho­log­i­cal under­stand­ing that dreams are our brain's way of "unwind­ing". Chaotic sig­nals occur in var­i­ous bits of the brain, which is then inter­preted into the images that we "see". Loosely trans­lated, it's our brain "talk­ing to us" using pictures.

Ok, so we accept that our dream­ing life is (in what­ever way) a reflec­tion of our wak­ing lives. Now what?

Well, if dreams are our brain's way of talk­ing to us, why not use them to talk back?

Why not use that dream­time to really, gen­uinely, just like the Abo­rig­i­nals believe, affect our wak­ing experience?

So, you know, I've been doing this.

When­ever I wake from a par­tic­u­larly vivid dream, I imme­di­ately heal (I use tap­ping & a few other things, but any­thing would do the trick) on any­thing that I felt strong emo­tion about. Doesn't mat­ter what the emo­tion is. Doesn't mat­ter how ludi­crous the imagery. I don't inter­pret any­thing. I'm talk­ing back to my brain (maybe), or heal­ing the dream­time (maybe), but either way, I use exactly the imagery that's been pro­vided to me.

I delib­er­ately pre­tend that what­ever I've dreamt is real. I relive it, feel it, as strongly as I can, and heal while doing so.

So, in the above dream, all the bits in bold had strong emo­tions (some iden­ti­fi­able, some not) attached, so I healed on them. Pretty obvi­ously, there's feel­ing of depri­va­tion, loss, self-recrimination, and so on — and, of course, sim­i­larly obvi­ous par­al­lels with those emo­tions in my own wak­ing life.

Much less obvi­ously, all the bits that are bold cleared things. A lot of them. I still really have no idea what was healed, but it was def­i­nitely many, many things. Much of it lead spon­ta­neously to much deeper issues I wasn't aware of. More inter­est­ingly, all of it was sur­pris­ing. I wasn't aware that I was even think­ing about any of this while I was awake.

Now that I've healed I can def­i­nitely see, in hind­sight, those thoughts & feel­ings I was hav­ing that I no longer am, that directly relate to things I healed on. Plus, of course, there's a bunch of other stuff that I know has gone that I sim­ply can't put into words.

I healed my dream­time, and my wak­ing life has changed, notice­ably, significantly.

I still haven't answered the ques­tion, "Which is more real, dream­time or wak­ing life?" or even "Which is the objec­tive, which the sub­jec­tive?" Maybe I never will, but one thing I know for sure, those Abo­rig­i­nals are def­i­nitely onto some­thing. Even bet­ter, we don't have to know or even care which is which to use it as a tool to sig­nif­i­cantly improve our lives, both dream­ing and waking.

I'll tell you some­thing else for free. Every sin­gle time I've healed a dream's imagery, that dream has never come back.