“What Dreams May Come?”

Over this past Easter week-end, during a time of celebration for the rebirth of Spring, I took a first step onto a path I have wanted to commit to for many years; a path toward conscious dreaming. In Damanhur, where I live, each month a message to our Community arrives, channeled from the Oracle forces.

The message conveyed this month was:

Longing and desire
Propeller to becoming.
Give life to dreams,
give dreams to life.
Dreams sent:
trace/path to the journey of the soul;
if woven:
hook for new plane of time.
Azure magic for fluidifying.
Budding the feminine.
Quesiti reread to be understood.
Strengthen alliances
toward the door of Solstice.

Last Friday, when I visited my dear soul friend, Formica, in the treehouse where she lives, she was preparing materials for a course she was about to teach over the next two days.  When she shared it was a course in dreaming, I felt the immediate pull to participate. Formica is a gifted dreamer who has been engaged in the study of the dreamworld, for many decades. This felt like a synchronic door opening.

We spend one third of our lives sleeping.  That is 25 years out of a 75 year life!  This is a huge percentage of our lifetime that we pass unconsciously.  What if we could “wake up” in our dream world and actually use our experiences there to consciously connect the dream realm to our waking world?

I often tell the story of first arriving in Damanhur and meeting people whom I felt I already knew and who seemed also to know me.  There was no possibility I had met any of these folks during my travels and work, which had taken me all over the world. Many had never left this part of Italy.  My perception was that I knew these souls from working together in the dream realm for more than 30 years. I did not have a fully conscious grasp of what we had been doing together there, but the sensation was clear and compelling enough for me to uproot myself and my family; and for us move from Los Angeles, half-way around the world, to live together with these souls here in Damanhur, in the foothills of the alps of Northern Italy.

So, with Formica as a trusted guide, I devoted my Easter weekend, to seeking more understanding of the World of Dreams and the potentials that are available to us there. I am committing myself to embarking on this path toward conscious dreaming.

We live in the World of Form, which is a vast territory inclusive of our earth and all of the galaxies.  Yet, the Dream World is an even vaster territory that extends beyond the far reaches of our imagination all the way into the world of the dead, and beyond. Like an onion with delicate layer upon layer, this dimension is rich and complex.

Formica shared that when Damanhur was founded forty-one years ago, one of the first things Oberto Airaudi, (Falco Tarassaco), who was our visionary spiritual leader on whose teachings Damanhur was built, did was to create the City of Dreams, a parallel version of Damanhur, in the Dream Realm.

Could this be an explanation for why I had felt I knew so many Damanhurians when I first met them on my initial visit nine years ago? The sense I had that I had been working with them in the Dream Realm, is this where that work had taken place? Had I been visiting Damanhur in the realm of dreams long before finding it in this reality?

We are all familiar with our five external senses. Here in Damanhur, we also recognize what we call the “inner senses.” These are the senses that are connected to our soul journey. In our dreams course, Formica spoke about five particular inner senses (we have identified 33 in total) which are important for this first level of dream exploration. These senses are:

1.) The Dream sense

2.) The sense of the Divine

3.) The sense of Desire (described as an internal spiritual muscle which keeps us believing in something).

4.) The sense of Time Memory (as something beyond our personal time).

5.) The sense of Exchange (the profound ability to be in exchange with other creatures, not necessarily solely of this realm).

Falco said in his original teachings that awakening our inner senses passes through our Dream sense. The gravity of this idea gives source to the desire I felt to participate in this course.

The dream realm is thousands of times more complex than this world. In order to learn to navigate the complexity of this realm we will need to learn something of the laws that govern the dream world.

Over the two days under Formica’s tutelage, we learned of the necessity to create a strategy for awakening in our dream realm. We were introduced to a series of tools that could help us in the exploration of the first four levels of our dream worlds. These are the personal levels, the projections of our subconscious.  This was the part of the dream world that Freud explored in his well known work.

When we are able to travel beyond these first four levels, we pass into the vast territories of the dream world and have the possibility of going as far as the realm of the dead. The first four levels are like a dot compared to the infinity represented in the fifth and sixth levels of the dream world.

We were given a series of eight tools that we can use to begin to consciously navigate the dream world.  For the past five nights I have been using these tools and feel myself making the first baby steps to becoming conscious after I close my eyes and transition into the dimension of dreams.

One of the tools, which I will share an image of below, we created during the course. It is a Dream Stick. We had the fortune to spend one afternoon of our course in the Sacred Wood of Damanhur, an enchanted and enchanting forest that is connected to The Temples of Humankind. Because this forest is held sacred here in Damanhur, nothing is allowed to be removed from the grounds, not leaf nor stone. Thanks to our dreams study, we were each allowed to take from the woods a small stick, magical in their own right, given their sacred origin. We then dedicated our time and attention to decorating our wooden sticks; infusing them with our energy and belief that they will assist us as we begin to navigate the dream realm with the new perspectives we have learned in this first level dream course.

In the five days since I finished the course, following the strategies that I learned there, I am already seeing a profound difference in my relationship with the dream realm. Each morning, the journaling of my experience in this other dimension seems to feed back into my next night’s sleep an awareness that was not present prior to beginning this path. I am deeply interested in where this path will lead, both in my dream world and in my day-to-day life.

*A note on the title of this blog post.  “What Dreams May Come,” was a film produced by a former mentor and associate of mine back in the States.  Here, I use it in tribute to Danish prince Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be…” soliloquy, in prelude to a journey I will share with you next week. I will travel to the Loire Valley in France, to participate in an experience hosted by renowned astrologer Laurence Hillman and my friend/colleague and thought leader, Richard Olivier. Together, they will lead a small group of us through a weeklong exploration of life mission as archetypically represented in our natal charts, against the backdrop of the esoteric aspects of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”