A Collective Dreaming Project

A Vision: The Collective Dreaming Project is a grassroots effort by a talented group of dreamers, including artists, psychologists, musicians, poets, teachers, politicians, gardeners, housekeepers, farmworkers, children, grandparents, lovers, bakers, healers and business people—to name a few—to teach a larger community the foundations of dreaming and create awareness of the reality of our individual participation in the collective dreaming of the species and planet. This Project intends to host classes, seminars and workshops involving art, music, dance and movement, spoken word, and literature in experiential gatherings to awaken individuals and groups to the power of our collective dreaming, awakening the collective dream within us.

Peggy Noonan pondered the effect of Sept. 11 on our national psyche in her July 19, 2002 article in the Wall Street Journal article entitled “The Nightmare and the Dreams: How has Sept. 11 affected our national unconscious.” She talks about a baby boom since the attacks on New York City, and, also, about our dreams. She writes:

A dream boom, too. The other day I spoke with a friend I hadn't seen since the world changed. He was two blocks away when the towers fell, and he saw everything. We have all seen the extraordinary footage of that day, seen it over and over, but few of us has seen what my friend described: how in the office buildings near the World Trade Center they stood at the windows and suddenly darkness enveloped them as the towers collapsed and the demonic cloud swept through. "It was total darkness," he told me. But the lights were on. They stood in his office wearing wet surgical masks. They couldn't go out, but inside their building the smoke worked its way into the air conditioning. So they turned it off and stood there sweating and watching on TV what was happening two blocks away.

Did you see those forced to jump? I asked.

"Yes," he said, and looked away. No descriptions forthcoming.

Have you had bad dreams?

"Yes," he said, and looked away. No descriptions forthcoming.

I thought about this for a few days. My friend is brilliant and by nature a describer of things felt and seen. But not this time. I spoke to a friend who is a therapist. Are your patients getting extraordinary dreams? I asked.

"Always," he laughs.

Sept.11-related?

"Yes," he says, mostly among adolescents.

I asked if he was saving them, writing them down. He shook his head no.

So: The Sept. 11 Dream Project. We should begin it. I want to, though I'm not sure why. I think maybe down the road I will try to write about them. Maybe not. I am certain, however, that dreams can be an expression of a nation's unconscious, if there can be said to be such a thing, and deserve respect. (Carl Jung thought so.)

What can we do with such a calling? This was made five years ago: what has been done to move this visionary idea forward? Our dreams have been talking about not only the Sept. 11 attacks, but about how our national unconscious has continued to ask us to change: as individuals, and as a nation. The war in Iraq continues, despite millions of citizens opposed to this effort. Are we not, as a nation, ignoring our dreams in the same way our government is ignoring our calls to end the war? Are we not listening to the inner voices that attempt to guide our waking lives, ignoring them as though they hold no “real” authority or power? If the citizens of our nation are powerless, ignored by the “responsible” government, then, too, our dreams and visions are being ignored by us, a “responsible” citizenry.

I envision a Collective Dreaming Project as a grassroots movement to awaken each of us to the power of our dreams, and to begin harnessing this power by our very simple and elementary act of working to bring our dreams out of the night and into the day world: if by nothing else, remembering them, talking about them, and being open to the expressions they seek in the world. Perhaps we don’t need to leave our day jobs in order to satisfy this requirement. Perhaps we don’t need to leave our families, our churches, our social organizations; yet, by acknowledging our dreams, we are leaving behind the status quo that says our dreams mean nothing and only express “day residue,” “garbage,” and “infantile wishes and fantasies.” Taking our dreams seriously—acknowledging the imagery and symbols we awaken with each morning—means taking a new road for most of us. It means opening ourselves to the possibility that there is a guiding force within us that is seeking expression. We don’t need to be artists, musicians, or poets in order to be guided by our dreams. We simply listen, acknowledge them, notice them, feel them in our bodies—and the world will respond. There is a much larger dream occurring that we each our dreaming. Our mechanistic worldview denies the validity of the dream, and look at the mess we’re in: global warming, pollution, dying lands and waters, toxic waste, and governments no longer held accountable to the people who elected them. Perhaps by waking up to the messages of the dreams we can begin to clean our psychic garbage and move into a worldwide movement of healing. In this way we can hear the “messages” arising in our dreams and collectively move past this age of terrorism striking across the world. Our psyches, too, contain the energies of terrorism: for they have not been heard or listened to, and want our attention. How else does one become noticed? How else does one make a mark upon the world? Our dreams, visions and intuitions have been ignored, and they, too, will find an outlet for expression—as have terrorists all across the world. Maybe this very psychic act of listening to our dreams will manifest outwardly into the world so that terrorists, too, will find alternative outlets in order to be heard.

It’s time we take the dream out of the psychotherapist’s office, out of the consulting room, and return it into the world via our bodies. Waking each morning with an awareness of the dream, we consciously move it where it wants to go, into the world. This is serving the dream of the collective, not to mention our own individual dream seeking expression. By consciously waking in it, with it and within it, the dream is awakened into the world. We don’t need to bring it to a psychotherapist in order to validate the dream. We may not even do anything with it.

Peggy Noonan was hearing something deep within herself back in 2002, and perhaps felt it was an “aside” that needed expression, yet had no form. The Collective Dreaming Project, in working to harness the dreaming energies throughout communities across the world, could serve as a form. This Project is being molded right now in our dreams, through our artistic expressions, and in our willingness to move away from the status quo. No war march on Washington will have as much power as that generated to us each night in the dream. This is our march, this is our protest: listening to our nightly dreams and bringing them into our waking world. We awaken from the status quo in doing this, and the collective energies created by this movement will foster change, and the dream of the collective is asking this in these moments.

The Dreaming Is Calling Forward

I have been receiving inquiries regarding my earlier blog regarding hurricanes, nature, and our dreaming. How can we change something we have dreamed together?

The Collective Dream is always being dreamed, and it is always present, always aware of itself, and always being expressed, however it has been dreamed. Each of us is a part of this greater dream of the collective, through our individual dreams and the dreams we live out each day.
How we create this dream is up to us, and we see the reflection of that in our daily lives. We are also in tune with the collective dream, and we see that reflected in our world, and in the dream of the planet, which, if we are able to listen, speaks to us in our collective dream.

We are always in possession of the knowledge we need through our dreams. How well we apply that knowledge is up to us: how much we are able to allow the dream to speak through us, so that we are not mindfully directing it, no matter how odd or strange it may feel to our waking bodies. This knowledge is always being expressed through us, and the more attune we are to it via the dream, the more it will be more fully expressed. So it is up to us whether we are reading our dreams properly in our bodies.

I mention the Collective Dream because it is being played out in a number of natural disasters involving earthquakes and hurricanes, which seem to be indicative of how we are all privileged co-conspirators of these events, witnessed by a large number of dreamologists over the last two years in their nightly dreams. We are beginning to understand as a mass that we do create everything, including seasonal fluxes in the weather. Our dreams serve as indicators as what is manifesting in our human collective, and if it is seen as something to come, then we can then begin to utilize our natural abilities as humans to listen in ways that will allow for the positive manifestations within our collective psyche. This is a responsibility each of us has within, and no matter what kind of brow-beating the preacher might illustrate during the course of a sermon, it is our own individual duty to be in tune with our own inner guidance, and no one else can do that for us.

So what do we do once we’ve already dreamed up a hurricane and it’s heading towards land? How do we change that dream that we’ve already set into motion? Or were we even contributors to the diabolical movement of Mother Nature? Isn’t she responsible? Well....

Questions of that nature should be left to Match Game ’74. Let Nipsey Russell laugh to those questions in this day and age! People are dreaming the truth—people are dreaming the lies, and they are realizing the difference in their bodies, and this is the only we we can each attune ourselves with the greater, and that includes the collective, so, sorry all you “Chosen Ones” theorists. Our dreams are showing us that we have been dreaming these storms for two years and no one had the collective determination to alter the creation of these movements of Nature. Quite possibly, in truth, they were altered versions of something that could have been much more catastrophic in this moment in time for us as a collective. Perhaps we are recipients of a lesser evil in days like these: who knows for sure? But whatever the scenario, rest assured that we are a collective that is part of a greater collective and we might not always have the final say in decisions after we’ve already given our input, when we’ve cast our ballots.

We owe one another the gift of listening to our dreams. It’s time we listened to our dreams in a different way, outside of the limiting psychoanalytical methods and ego-centric vision, and in doing so, we realize our contribution to the overall well-being of the planet, our families, our communities, and our neighbors. It’s too late to affect the root causes of our storm and strife by giving to the Red Cross after the disaster has struck. We have created the storm of discontent in our minds, in our deliberate rejection of our own trusting natures. And so we each suffer in our own ways, blind to the messages trying to awaken us from our powerless images that keep us imprisoned, impotent, and ignorant.

Our movement is always from within, and we have a choice, every day, to choose how we are going to live that movement. We can stroke the fire of passion, stoke the fire of wisdom, and whisper into the fire of love by choosing to live through our dreams of change and inspiration in a new way, and that is through conscious awareness of how we are dreaming up the world around us. We are seeing it in our dreams: changing our perceptions of who we are, and how we relate to one another. We have that choice each moment; there’s not a book on the planet that will teach us how to do it. Only your dreams are showing you how and in ways you won’t recognize unless you are paying attention on the “outside” world as well. We don’t have to listen to a gaggle of crows to go shouting in the night to know an earthquake has just rippled through the neighborhood—we can feel it in our bodies. Our dreams are being felt in our bodies in the same way, so we can listen to our dreams by hearing our bodies speak to us in ways we haven’t heard before. Our minds may not bring back a glimpse of the dream, but the bodies will always have the dream. We can learn how to tune into our bodies so that we can hear the wisdom of the dream in a new way.

Our collective dream is speaking to each of us. It is up to each of us to listen to our nightly communique, and to bring it back into the world with us the next morning. By listening to that dream and attuning ourselves to the world around us through the dream, we can each contribute towards healing the collective dream in a powerful way. The more we focus on that inner source within, we allow for our role in the world to become ever-more visible, and our dreams begin to make more sense. We have stepped out of the limited egotistic view of the dream, and can begin to understand it from an erotic sense, one that speaks through our engagement with the world, and the world’s passionate dance with us. By allowing the dream to be felt in our bodies, and outside of the mental realm of analysis, things in the dream begin to make greater sense to us, since we understand the dreams through our senses, our body. It is the ego-based mind that has difficulty perceiving the truth within a dream, since it wasn’t created as an organ of the body. The intuitive, heart-centered space within each of us is an organic creation of the body, fully attuned to the dreamspace. Cultures indigenous to their homeland, such as the Kogi indians of Colombia, practice the lost art of prayer attuned to the “heart of the world,” the heart of the Mother, the beating of the Satchamama Mountain. Their children are born into a darkened cave, where they will remain for their first seven years of life, never seeing the light of day until that moment. They are full within the Mother, living in that cave, their perception of the world based on their inner knowing. This is the tribe that has said they have “seen” the world progress and “knows” the modern world through their connection with their own hearts and their own dreams—however more advanced they may be in these arts, they are still connected with us in this space of the collective dream. So know we are all doing the work, together—but that doesn’t mean we cannot begin to create a new world as we each wake up to our dreams and our dreaming processes so that others may, too, feel the effect you will now have on the world. It is a strong group process that we are each a part of as part of the collective. These ancient tribes have always been working with us, and they are asking us now to kind of speed things up—in our awakening, that is; in our individual “waking up” to our dreams, and to our relationships with our bodies, so that we can experience a continuity of life filled with inspiration and joy, bliss and radiance, without the static-filled channel of fear that emits from the ego-based mind, smothering whatever glimmerings from the dreamworld we might be feeling during the day, and limiting another moment of change.

It's Time to Take Our Medicine (International Version)

It's time to take our medicine.

It seems as though we've been getting sicker and sicker, weaker and weaker; our days are shorter and are nights are painfully longer. We can't get up without moaning and groaning, or stand up for too long without our legs becoming weak and frail.

It's time to take our medicine.

Whatever we do, however we feel, we must take this time to do what's right and take our medicine. Our medicine is waiting.

It's time to take our medicine.In what way can we be of service? How are we failing the others? How are we failing ourselves?

It's time to take our medicine.

Looking high upon the mountain, we see our future waiting for us, but we're far from being right. We must look within and do what is right.

It's time to take our medicine.

The sickness we've created is overtaking everything. What we thought was real is illusion, and that illusion has taken on our illness. Our sickness is now the sickness of the planet, and it's time to take our medicine.

We wait for someone to victoriously save us from all of this, but that is impossible, for the secret lies hidden from us, and always will be hidden: for we are the only ones who can do the saving.

It's time to take our medicine.

Who says what is right or what is wrong? Who gives us the measurement by which we lead our own lives? Can it be that we are doing the wrong thing the wrong way, which furthers the spreading of our illness? Can it be that we are making our illness worse by taking the wrong prescriptions? Perhaps we are, indeed, being given the wrong medicine.

So here's the prescription for the right medicine:

Lay off television. Lay off going to church. Lay off listening to the president. Lay off your girlfriend, your wife, your husband. Lay off work. Lay off your boss. Lay off anyone telling you how to live your life. Lay off driving. Lay off using your telephone, your computer, your nasal spray. Lay off your ideas. Lay off everything you did yesterday.

Now go. Go into the woods. Go into the waters of life and play, sing, jump for joy. Go crazy. Go meekly into the forests and dance with the elves and pygmies and beings you forgot existed. Drink the waters of life. Drink the elixirs of the gods. Go nuts. Go for it. Go to town riding on a pony. But just go. And leave everything behind.

This, my friends, is your medicine. And take it willingly, at high doses, and without a fuss. Three times a day for a year, take your medicine. Give up your ideas on how it will taste, how it will feel, or how it will work. Just take your medicine. And when you think you cannot take anymore, take some more.

When you're tired of your medicine, put on some reggae music and dance. When you think it's not working, put on some soul music and sing. When the medicine has you going out of your mind, dance on the streets like your soul has never seen before. Call your doctor and ask him if he'd like to try your medicine. And listen to your heart sing loudly with joy.

Your medicine will work because the medicine you are taking now is killing you. Eat, drink, snort, and imbibe this prescription before you even have a chance to make it to your pharmacist. Your pharmacist won't be there when you arrive to have this new prescription filled, because I've just talked to him, and he's gonna beat you to the woods and the forests and the ocean water.

And if I do my job properly, maybe the president will beat the both of you to it, too.

The Energies of Revolution, 2007 Version

Perhaps there’s a certain energy that is always seeking to be expressed in a people, in a nation; and certain individuals come along in time who are able to carry that energy to its fullest. In doing so, they give that energy its sacred place in a nation or society—or, perhaps, on the planet. The person’s name may live on as a reminder to the people of that particular energy; now, that energy is personified. But the energy itself, whatever its essence, is always requiring a human home; and, thusly, will always find one here on the planet, in whatever culture is open and receptive to it.

So, perhaps, that is the case with the energy of Revolution, or of any archetypal energy? If the energy is always requiring a home, perhaps it may appear in certain times. The energy, therefore, is always seeking a manifestation. Take these passages from the great revolutionary Che Guevara in the book, Che Guevara Speaks:

Camilo was a man of anecdotes, a million anecdotes. They were a part of his nature…(his) qualities, which today we sometimes forget or overlook, were present in all his actions, something precious that few men can attain. It is attain, as Fidel has said, that he had no great amount of book learning, but he had the natural intelligence of the people who had chosen him from among thousands to place him in that privileged place earned by his audacity, his tenacity, his intelligence and devotion.

Camilo did not measure danger. He utilized it as a game, he played with it, he courted it, he attracted and handled it and, with his guerrilla’s mentality, a mere cloud could not detain or deflect him from the line he was following. It happened at a time everyone knew him, admired and loved him; it could have happened before, and then his story would have been known merely as that of a guerrilla captain. T here will be many Camilos, as Fidel has said; and there have been Camilos, I can add—Camilos who died before completing the magnificent work he had managed to complete, thus entering the pages of history. Camilo and the other Camilos—the ones who fell early and those still to come—are the index of the people’s strength; they are the most complete expression of the heights that can be reached by a nation fighting to defend its purest ideals and with complete faith in the fulfillment of its noblest goals. (Pp. 96-97)

That phrase: “those who fell early and those still to come—are the index of the people’s strength.” How often do we see that in a nation, in a people? It is that individual is the embodiment of an energy that seeks expression through the energy of birthing something new, like a new country, in this case. That is powerful energy, and it seeks expression and can only be expressed through a pure soul: an individual so committed to that energy that he only lives for that energy. Get it? He not only would give his life for a cause, for a nation, for a president; but, he first and foremost would—and will—give his life for the energy itself. It, the energy, has possession of the individual.

Perhaps when such an energy has us, and we do not give in to it, that we suffer, living a life that has not been truly lived. Perhaps it is the gods that are within these energies, and when the gods call us and we don’t listen, we suffer, living a life devoid of any real meaning. Maybe society today is living as a soulfully malnourished bunch because the gods are being ignored. We are taught that the gods do not exist; so, when they call, we do not listen. Those that do listen and have no idea how to listen suffer in other ways: they become “psychotic,” “schizophrenic,” etc. A society living devoid of the gods is a schizophrenic and psychotic society.

Is it the gods who are calling us to heal this racial strife that still exists in the world? Was it the gods calling Rosa Parks in the 1950’s to get on that bus in Selma, Alabama? Were the gods calling Martin Luther King, Jr. to begin talking about racism in his pulpit back in 1954 or so? Were the gods calling Marcus Garvey to begin really talking about racial inequality in the 1914? And was Lyndon Johnson refusing to hear the gods in 1964 when he began passing legislation to pacify the racial situation in America, leading to riots in 1968?

The solution has still not been found: Band-Aids in America, England, Africa, Brasil are barely holding things together. Is it more than just racial? Is it more so an economic problem now? Or has the racial problem grown so large that it now has become an economic problem, completely overshadowing the original problem?

No, it’s more like a Jungian approach: what lies within the complex is an archetype. The illness is poverty, hunger, childhood homelessness, adult homelessness, AIDS. Look at Africa now and Midwestern USA during the draught of 1930’s: the plains states had all their crops replaced, or something, so that the topsoil was all blown away by erosion. There was nothing left to grow.

The soul of Africa—its people—was removed during the 19th and 20th century during slavery. Today, there is no topsoil: the land is crying for its people to be returned; its topsoil was removed to England, America, South America. So the country is now desolate.

And the Jungian approach: at the root of the complex is the issue of racism. Blacks. Racial bigotry. Holding the idea that blacks are lesser than, Mexicans are lesser than, Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Hawaiians, Intuits, Native Americans are lesser than. The path never ends on this one: anything other than white is different. And so we have our problems today.

What has all this done to the psychic layer of the planet, of the planetary etheric layer? Has all this hatred, bigotry, and fear clouded the etheric layer of the planet, not to mention that of all the souls on earth? Is there something to say about all this kind of stuff? Perhaps there are layers that we cannot see that are very harmful, not only to ourselves, but to the planet as well.
Perhaps, harmful to the Universe?

Guevara says this:

We have maintained for some time that given its similar characteristics, the struggle in the Americas will in time acquire continental dimensions. It will be the scene of many big battles in behalf of humanity, in behalf of its liberation…new battlers and new leader will arise in the heat of the revolutionary struggle…and the Yankee agents of repression will increase in number. (p. 153)

And the words of Winston Rodney, otherwise known as the reggae great, Burning Spear:

Christopher Columbus is a damn blasted liar

Christopher Columbus is a damn blasted liar

Yes Jah

You tell 'em, Burning Spear. Jah Rastafari!

Are You Catching This Now?

It’s amazing to think that what we are doing in this moment actually has importance to the past. It’s something I certainly never thought about until just a few years ago: and it wasn’t a reading of Quantum Physics that helped bring about that revelation, either.

Actually, it was a couple of years ago in a Mayan Temascal sweat lodge in Tulum, Mexico, that this awareness came to me. I’d never experienced a sweat lodge before, and it was as if the spirit of my ancestors—the spirits of those who came before me—came to my awareness. It was a powerful “vision” of sorts, one that instilled in me the fact that the healing work I was doing was, in turn, healing them, the ancestors. I intuitively knew this had truth, especially in how my work could be affecting my familial ancestors.

Little did I know this work would affect more than my family. It is as though our work at healing ourselves heals the future as well. I guess the work with Quantum Resonance proves that: the work by David Bohm and writings by Michael Talbot prove these things.

The fact that so many of us are gathering “insights” into facts and truths about the natural world prove this as being true on many levels. We are being taught by the world around us, despite what our science textbooks might have us believe. The wind, the stones, the water: they are all sharing wisdom with us, and it is up to us to be open and receptive to this wisdom.

Everything is shifting and changing. Everything is sharing, moving, wiggling, laughing.

Everything is abundantly being shared with each of us. Everything is filled with ancestral wisdom, if we can allow ourselves the opportunity to experience that. Such wisdom is a gift, and it is to our benefit if we open it and not leave it for the next generation to open. If only we can open it, its work will already be underway for the next generation, and those who came before us as well.

You see, it is possible that the ancestors seek healing in ways they couldn’t heal themselves. It is as though they couldn’t complete a task, and left it for the future generations to complete it. It’s inconceivable to imagine in what ways the task was left for future generations, but it is sometimes left, nonetheless.

I firmly believe what is called the idea of leaving something for yourself for a future life. Robert Thurman explained this concept in an interview over a decade ago in Parabola magazine:

Tibetans believe it’s like a micro-cellular DC-ROM that’s placed in what you might call the spiritual gene—a gene with all its codes, but spiritual, because it doesn’t go with the physical genes or physical flesh, but it goes instead in the rebirthed soul of the begin. It’s like a genetic code in the soul that goes from body to body. In the sixteenth century, a teacher had planted this on the spiritual gene of this person, and it suddenly was triggered now, many lifetimes later, in the twentieth century.

There are truly treasures everywhere: treasures that are given to us to heal ourselves, heal our ancestors, and heal the future. These treasures might come in our DNA, they might come in the song of a bird; they might come in a sunset, or even in a National Football League kickoff return. Who knows! The key is to be open, receptive, and in wonderment: for the possibility for the impossible is all around.

Checking In to the Dream Hospital

There is a place in Austin, Texas, where you can go and get your shoes repaired. You could probably even get a shoeshine, too, if you wanted. But it’s more of a place to get your soles fixed, or your shoe hardware remolded, or whatever.

It’s called the Shoe Hospital. What a cool name, huh? I’ve got a friend back in Austin who is from Cuba, and he and his buddies don’t speak too much English. They are learning, and quickly. But imagine their confusion and panic when, in their midst of learning English, they drive by this place called the “Shoe Hospital.”

Being half-baked comedians, these guys immediately began to conjure up images of doctors standing over pairs of “ill” shoes, their stethoscopes laid atop the shoe buckles, seeking out that last bit of pulse before grabbing the shoe laces and struggling to resuscitate those poor shoes. What a hoot!

My Cuban buddies really got a good laugh over the images they had of nurses in the Shoe Hospital, hunkered over the shoes, checking pulses and respiratory rates and handling tennis shoes that needed IV’s.

There’s a medicine man from Africa who was in California this summer, and he’s got images in his mind of a different kind of hospital. He works a lot with ill patients from his village in Zimbabwe and also with the Earth, specifically with water spirits. “We’ve got all kinds of hospitals for people here on this planet,” Mandaza said a couple of years ago at a gathering in Big Bear, California. “But why don’t we have any hospitals for the Earth?”

We’ve got hospitals for shoes, but none for the Earth.

I, too, imagine a kind of Earth Hospital. Actually, I go a bit further than Mandaza. I envision a return to the Greek way of working with dreams, the old style like the Oracle at Delphi. Why not Dream Hospitals? Why not places where people can take their dreams to be worked; places where people can go to dream?

Why not a hospital to resuscitate our dreams, our visions—and not just our nightly visions? We need help with re-creating our visions for life, and a Dream Hospital would be such a place.
I envisioned this dream hospital idea again this morning, and the vision is this: working with people to re-create their lives. A place where we listen to their dreams, their fantasies; engaging art, stories, music, in a way that opens their hearts and souls to the calling of their lives. And this isn’t just with people: I envision this with businesses, too.

I know someone in Brazil who was handed her family business after the death of her mother. She feels an obligation to this business. She came to realize this business is an entity—not just a business entity—but also an alive, animated, creature; a Be-ing in its own right. She feels it as something that has given her family over 30 years of a livelihood, a foundation for their lives—in more than just material ways. It gave her the ability to go to school and earn a degree in psychology. It fed her family. And, now, it needs attention.

There is so much that is alive and nurturing in our lives, and we don’t tend to these things. Whether it’s our house, our car, our business, or our children, everything needs tending, nurturing—everything in our lives needs love! And, whether it is a hospital for people injured from a hurricane, or for shoes, or for the Earth, or for our dreams, these hospitals are needed!

We cannot overlook any aspect of our world. What if we had tended Mother Earth in a more nurturing way—would she had needed to unleash her power two years ago in the Asian continent and the following summer in the Gulf Coast? What if we were tending our dreams and nurturing our souls—not just our soles—through a Dream Hospital?

Perhaps, as this African medicine man named Mandaza says, we need to do a little more of the “donkey work.” We need to get out into the fields and till our souls and our dreams, nurturing the things that we take for granted in our lives. Perhaps if we did this kind of “donkey work” we might all be in healthier places today—in our land, our bodies, and our souls.

And, perhaps, our soles might be feeling better, too.

TONIGHT is Collective Dreaming Night!!!!!!

The dreaming time offers humanity the opportunity to collectively “work out” its dayworld scenarios, in addition to moving us closer to our awakening into the reality of other worlds and dimensions. We as humans have been given the spiritual task of looking after the planet, and it is in the dreamtime that we collectively “vote” on how we will do this. Our conscious energies direct the dreamworld energies in this way, with the “voting” showing up in how the world looks the next day.

Obviously, the voting isn’t going too good, and it is because humanity is not yet “conscious” of what it is doing. As African medicine man Agustine Mandaza reminds us, we as humans are fortunate enough to be provided with technologically advanced medical care in order to prolong our lives and make our lives easier. Where, he asks, is this care for the planet? Where are the Earth Hospitals?

So, in the dreaming, we have the technology to prolong the life of the planet, not to mention our collective human body. We think we’re doing this “out here,” but the technology for this exists in the dreaming. It is something we must wake up to here in the dayworld.

On Monday, May 21, we are offering a Collective Dreaming Night in which each of us can consciously go to bed with a living prayer to take to the Dreaming World. And since we are a collective human body, the more of us that go to bed with the same prayer, the larger that prayer will be, and the greater effect it will have on the planet, and on our fellow human beings.

As part of our monthly Collective Dreaming Night, we are offering the following prayer for Monday, May 21:
As you retire to bed on Monday night—at whatever time that might be—ask for a dream. As a collective body, our energies are shared in the dreaming world, and with the power of intent, these energies can be focused towards change, and for healing in that realm. We have that power. We create a wave in the dreaming that ripples out into our waking world. Quantum physics shows us this is a real power. Imagine us all having the same dream!

On this Collective Dreaming Night, we are asking Gaia, Mother Earth, to show us in our Dream what we can begin doing on Tuesday to help her. It’s that simple. You may awake with an image of a person, or an activity, or a scenario—but what you are asking for are energies, and these show up as images and sensations in the body. And you are specifically asking for the energies of the Planetary Soul, Gaia, to present to you a very specific and personal message of how you can help her on Tuesday. Focus in your heart as you make this intention, and as you go to sleep, bring this question into your awareness. The dreaming energies will propel you into the world of dreams that will awaken you on Tuesday with an answer to your prayer. Keep a notepad by your bed, and write your dream down upon waking. It is very important that you waken and allow the dream to “come back,” and then write it down before you forget. These dreams are very slippery!

How can I help Mother Earth on Tuesday? That is our question for the Collective Dreaming Night in May. This is your personal question. Awake on Tuesday and then act on this dream. If you don't understand the message, don't worry; the fact that you've asked the question is important enough in the dreaming. Each of these nights “builds” energies as our collective body that will continue working for us as we continue this movement of consciously creating dreams that will impact the world. In this way, we are serving as an Earth Hospital, together.

Please email your dreams or, if you prefer, your experience, to greggechols@hotmail.com. Let us know if we may share your experience with others.

Slavery, and Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron"

It’s funny how after all these years we still imagine ourselves to be free of slavery in this country. We imagine that when Lincoln “freed” the slaves that everything was taken care of. Then, we imagined that when “equal rights” came about for people of all color in the 1960’s, everything was taken care of. Yet, now, in 2007, the very same spirit that supported slavery when this country was founded in 1776 is still present in this country, and many others.

How do such attitudes and beliefs continue to exist after all of these years? After the pain and struggle our Mothers and Grandmothers suffered through the Civil Rights movement, do you think it possible we would still have slavery in this country? I do not care whether you are black or white, brown or yellow, ignorant or educated, slavery still exists in the United States of America, and other countries, worldwide.

Slavery exists because it has been the nature of mankind to find other humans of lesser means to handle chores for them they otherwise wouldn’t want to do. Ever eaten at a restaurant? Do you go into a kitchen to get the food yourself? No. You have a server assist you, a waiter or waitress. You, by means of paying them a tip, are in a “superior” position to them. They may not be your “slave,” but if they go screwing up their order, they’re going to go home empty-handed from you.

Do you choose to drive your garbage down to the city dump each week? No. You pay the city to do it, and some poor ol’ chap has to drive that nasty garbage truck all around town, because you don’t want to. Hell, I am sure not driving that thing, either. Get somebody else!

Now these examples aren’t what you’d imagine as involving “slavery.” But what about the undocumented 65-year-old woman from El Salvador who you hire for whatever $$$ a week to look after your child and tend to your house? How about the young Mexican girl brought illegally into this country who now spends her days working two jobs, both “under the table”—with the threat of deportation if she doesn’t work each and every day, one day off a week?

Aha, you say: this guy is taking us on a ride in support of illegal workers and undocumented aliens. Well, maybe. But I’m also saying that you, Mister Green Jeans in the accounting office at the Los Angeles Times; well, you are as much as me waiting tables on your butt at the Delfina Hotel, or the Mexican girl on the overnight cleaning crew at that same hotel (which is outsourced, by the way, to one of these slavemongers).

You have probably, as a corporate employee, given away all of your power as a man or woman in order to “fit in” with the corporate world, hating every moment of it, and only doing it because “society” says you must! You must hold a decent job, support your family, and do the right thing. So you sit there in your cubicle with a migraine headache all day, your body overweight and miserable, and go through the motions as you’ve done every day for 12 years, “hoping” for tomorrow for retirement to come so you can get out of that hellhole.

But you’re not a slave!

I look at today’s “International Workers Day” and the march planned in downtown Los Angeles and recall my attitude at work about 15 months ago. I was working as a waiter in the restaurant at the Sheraton Delfina Hotel here in Santa Monica, totally depressed. A very good man working as a chef was getting his butt reamed by his supervisors because his gorgeous long hair was too long: he had to cut it off. I had a goatee upon hiring and had to shave that off, because it wasn’t corporate. A day or two after our friend with the hair was reprimanded, another cook got his butt reamed because of talking too loud. Then, I got in trouble again because I was leaning against the hostess podium in the restaurant, and then, well, I guess I’m a bad employee, because then I was in trouble for putting lemons in the customer’s drinks, because it wasn’t our policy. Heaven help us if the customer asked for them!

Now, admittedly, this is all chicken crap stuff. But it’s not exactly the most freedom-filled experience! I bit my tongue and wrote down a few things, keeping my cool. But the point is this: we are all imprisoned within the workforce here in this country, which means we’re all imprisoned, period. And it’s like that all over the world, Communist Russia in 1917 included.
I wrote these notes down during my days of feeling like I was back in prison again (check my website, www.collectivedreaming.com/ for more on that):

1/7 10 p.m.
Work is like prison.
You can’t talk too loud. You have to stand up straight. The Bosses are always checking on you. Your co-workers are always telling on you. You can’t wear your hair long. You can’t have facial hair. You have to eat at a certain time or you are disciplined. If you do anything wrong, you are disciplined. And all the Bosses are just like cops. Assholes.

1/7 10:30 p.m. –
The worker is doomed
to his miserable gloom
His punishment in life
and must stay in his room.
The people are tired
of being ruled by liars
so we retreat out the door
and leave this country ever more.

The worker is tired
of being beaten each day.
Go here
Go there
Not there
Not now
He must accept work as his fate
This job he must hate
Because it is his prison
His prison of life.

So, I now move into the juice of my story, and that is a very, very classic piece written by Kurt Vonnegut way back when. I first saw this essay published in the Wall Street Journal in the early 1990’s, and it shocked me—not only because I read it in the Journal, but because how “right on” it was, and is. Working on a Ph.D. in depth psychology, specifically on consciousness and levels of altered states, I find this to be the most accurate depiction of our current psychological state of mind as individuals in a “free” society. Check it out, it’s entitled Harrison Bergeron, and ladies and gentlemen, take note—it was written in 1961, just before many began to “wake up.” Are you waking up now?

Harrison Bergeron, 1961, by Kurt Vonnegut

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though. April, for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.

It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel’s cheeks, but she’d forgotten for the moment what they were about.

On the television screen were ballerinas.

A buzzer sounded in George’s head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.

“That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did,” said Hazel.

“Huh?” said George.

“That dance – it was nice,” said Hazel.

“Yup,” said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren’t really very good – no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn’t be handicapped. But he didn’t get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.

George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.

Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.

“Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer,” said George.

“I’d think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds,” said Hazel, a little envious. “All the things they think up.”

“Um,” said George.

“Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?” said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers. “If I was Diana Moon Glampers,” said Hazel, “I’d have chimes on Sunday – just chimes. Kind of in honor of religion.”

“I could think, if it was just chimes,” said George.

“Well – maybe make ‘em real loud,” said Hazel. “I think I’d make a good Handicapper General.”

“Good as anybody else,” said George.

“Who knows better’n I do what normal is?” said Hazel.

“Right,” said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that.

“Boy!” said Hazel, “that was a doozy, wasn’t it?”

It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their temples.

“All of a sudden you look so tired,” said Hazel. “Why don’t you stretch out on the sofa, so’s you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch.” She was referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in canvas bag, which was padlocked around George’s neck. “Go on and rest the bag for a little while,” she said. “I don’t care if you’re not equal to me for a while.”

George weighed the bag with his hands. “I don’t mind it,” he said. “I don’t notice it any more. It’s just a part of me.

“You been so tired lately – kind of wore out,” said Hazel. “If there was just some way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead balls. Just a few.”

“Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out,” said George. “I don’t call that a bargain.”

“If you could just take a few out when you came home from work,” said Hazel. “I mean – you don’t compete with anybody around here. You just set around.”

“If I tried to get away with it,” said George, “then other people’d get away with it and pretty soon we’d be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”

“I’d hate it,” said Hazel.

“There you are,” said George. “The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?”

If Hazel hadn’t been able to come up with an answer to this question, George couldn’t have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head.

“Reckon it’d fall all apart,” said Hazel.

“What would?” said George blankly.

“Society,” said Hazel uncertainly. “Wasn’t that what you just said?”

“Who knows?” said George.

The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn’t clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, “Ladies and gentlemen – ”

He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.

“That’s all right –” Hazel said of the announcer, “he tried. That’s the big thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard.”

“Ladies and gentlemen” said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred-pound men.

And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. “Excuse me – ” she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.

“Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen,” she said in a grackle squawk, “has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under–handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous.”

A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen – upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall.

The rest of Harrison’s appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever worn heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H–G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.

Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.

And to offset his good looks, the H–G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle–tooth random.

“If you see this boy,” said the ballerina, “do not – I repeat, do not – try to reason with him.”

There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges.

Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though dancing to the tune of an earthquake.

George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might have – for many was the time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. “My God –” said George, “that must be Harrison!”

The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile collision in his head.

When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone. A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen.

Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood in the center of the studio. The knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.

“I am the Emperor!” cried Harrison. “Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!” He stamped his foot and the studio shook.

“Even as I stand here –” he bellowed, “crippled, hobbled, sickened – I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!”

Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.

Harrison’s scrap–iron handicaps crashed to the floor.

Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall.

He flung away his rubber–ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder.

“I shall now select my Empress!” he said, looking down on the cowering people. “Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!”

A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.

Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all, he removed her mask.

She was blindingly beautiful.

“Now” said Harrison, taking her hand, “shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!” he commanded.

The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too. “Play your best,” he told them, “and I’ll make you barons and dukes and earls.”

The music began. It was normal at first – cheap, silly, false. But Harrison snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs.

The music began again and was much improved.

Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while – listened gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.

They shifted their weights to their toes.

Harrison placed his big hands on the girl’s tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers.

And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!

Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.

They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.

They leaped like deer on the moon.

The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it. It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling.

They kissed it.

And then, neutralizing gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.

It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.

Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.

It was then that the Bergerons’ television tube burned out.

Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George.

But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer.

George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. “You been crying?” he said to Hazel.

“Yup,” she said,

“What about?” he said.

“I forget,” she said. “Something real sad on television.”

“What was it?” he said.

“It’s all kind of mixed up in my mind,” said Hazel.

“Forget sad things,” said George.

“I always do,” said Hazel.

“That’s my girl,” said George. He winced. There was the sound of a riveting gun in his head.

“Gee – I could tell that one was a doozy,” said Hazel.

“You can say that again,” said George.

“Gee –” said Hazel, “I could tell that one was a doozy.”
_________________
May you wake up, and soon.

The Collective Vision of Our Dreams

When Sigmund Freud wrote Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, the world was a different place, and the collective consciousness of the humans on Earth was different. Cultures had yet to migrate from their homelands. Intercontinental travel was limited to steamships. Art had barely succeeding in breaking out of its church-influenced moorings. And, you would have had a hard time filling the Rose Bowl with the number of people on the planet who had experienced altered states of consciousness at that time.

There had yet to be a 1960’s movement into “expanded consciousness,” nor the computer revolution of the 1980’s and 90’s. Humankind knew itself by the doctrines laid out by the church and governments. Science was limited. Technology was virtually nonexistent.

The dreams that Sigmund Freud studied in order to produce Interpretations were dreams of Europeans isolated by thought and culture. The world was isolated. The humans who had consciously explored “other realms” were primarily those within shamanic cultures. And thanks to the church, dreams had been pathologized, left behind in the rubble of the Greek and Roman civilizations.

So, when Freud unearthed the importance of dreams for the Western culture, he was exploring a realm that had yet to be mined, as far as we are concerned. When Carl Gustav Jung left academics in 1913 to enter a four year “plunge” into the unconscious, our relationship with dreams was still infantile. When he came out of that shamanic-like initiation, he had penetrated a realm that had not been seriously by “Westerners” for centuries.

In only the last 50 years, the number of humans who have immersed themselves in dreamwork and the exploration of altered states of consciousness would fill at least a hundred Rose Bowls. From psychotherapy to meditation practices and yoga, experiential psychologies to tantra, dreamwork to psychointegrator plants and drugs, humans have not only dredged the unconscious in unprecedented levels, but they have found the “Holy Grail.” We are an awakening species, closer each day to finding ourselves in a perpetually altered state that will transform humanity into a new and God-like Being.

Because of this huge technological breakthrough in our ability to transcend waking consciousness, our dreams are not what they were in 1899. Yet, our psychologies still work with dreams based on technology over a hundred years old. We are using outdated manuals! Our dreams are no longer simply infantile wishes of pleasure-seeking fulfillment meant to overcome sexual frustration and Oedipal fantasies. They are nightly instructions on how to transcend the limitations imprisoning us in this life, plain and organically injecting our bodies with the elixir of immortality—that is, if we choose to pay attention. You see, that’s the catch with dreams: we must be receptive.

On top of this, our dreams are no longer the individualized portraits of our daily struggles and frustrations, but are collective messages for the entirety of our planet. Like the blind men touching the elephant, we are each given access to different aspects of our collective body, bringing back different sensations and images from the dreaming world. Yet as a whole, we are each carrying different pieces of the puzzle, awaiting that magic moment when we can lock in and solve the puzzle. We are coming closer to a collective “Aha!”

At no other time in our modern history have we been given access to such deep layers of the world’s psyche and universal psyche as well. Dreamers from all across the world are waking with visions of Gods and Goddesses, strange beings from other planets, and distinct messages from Gaia asking for our assistance. These are not the dreams of Freud and Jung. These are messages from our Higher Selves, from our collective human body.

To look at a dream in 2007 as simply being “wish-fulfillment” is not only naive, but it is morally incomprehensible. We can spend all day talking about global warming, but if we’re not tending to the dream in the deepest way possible, our political maneuverings and ecological work will be for naught. Our dreams are passageways to the Source, and closely listening and honoring those nightly messages bring us closer to actually healing the planet and ourselves. Roundtable talks won’t do that.

Like teenagers still adhering to outdated commandments, it is time we shed our naive ideas about dreams and dreaming. It is time we consciously take part in these nightly journeys and not only bring the dreaming energies into our dayworlds, but begin to reflect on our individual dream messages as being part of the collective. Not only are we receiving the same messages as a global body of humanity, but we are receiving very individually-tailored pieces of a global puzzle waiting to be solved. Is it an elephant? How large is it? And what can we do to help?

Our dreaming is collective. We help each other by paying attention to our own dreams, and then not only sharing them with others, but working together as a community to understand them together. In these times of impending global catastrophe, this is the most cost-effective, timely, and moral way to save Planet Earth—and ourselves. Do we have a choice not to listen to our dreams?

I think not.

Dancing in an Illogical Psychology

How does modern day psychology respond to dreams of “other worlds,” of visions appearing in the light of day that are as real as the sidewalk underneath our feet, and of bodily sensations that lead us into movement we hadn’t planned? Well, if it’s the psychology of which I am familiar and have studied towards my doctorate, these experiences would be termed pathological, psychotic, and, well, if you don’t mind the wording, schizophrenic. Our psychologies are not equipped to handle these types of very healthy experiences.

So then, let’s take away this modern day psychology, and look at these experience in another framework. Why not Illogical Psychology? Whatever is not given a healthy explanation in the form of clinical, analytical, archetypal, Freudian, Jungian, or any other form of psychology is Illogical, is it not? And since these experience are coming from within, we must look at them, therefore, from their source: Spirit.

Since we’re talking Illogical Psychology, then we can begin to invoke a language that has only been allowed expression by poets, artists, indigenous people, and those homeless-looking folks walking our streets in their “other” worlds. We can invoke a language that is timeless, syncretic, bold and audacious, filled with wonder and insanity, colored by lunatic influences that make us tremble and shake, and in more and more cases, awaken our bodies to unknown pleasures. This is illogical to modern science, illogical to modern psychology, and illogical to the average human stuck in the existence doled out to him or her by society. To sing the praises of experiences that spill over from our dreaming world into our waking life is illogical according to society’s framework of existence, and, my friends, they can get you committed. Don’t despair, because what I am singing is a commitment to that “other” framework of existence, to a life of the illogical sort, of the “madman” walking the alleys in bliss, in no-time, in the grips of a power that is who we are all meant to be, and that is our Ego-less Self. That, one and all, is illogical, a “mental illness” when defined by modern medicine.

E Vou Te Contar! Let my Brasilian brothers and sisters translate this for you as this: Let Me Tell You Something!!

Illogical Psychology applauds those brave brothers and sisters who dare bring those dream energies into their waking lives, because the dream energies so many of us are experiencing these days are demanding that the bridge between Heaven and Earth be walked, and lived. This means we must stand firm on this new ground that has no substance in this world, yet our trust and faith and endurance creates that ground. The more that bridge is held, the stronger it becomes, and the more we can withstand those Ego-filled demands that ask—no, demand—that we “return to our senses” and do the “normal” thing, the more we create a new world here, now. We can hold our ground on this bridge, live between Heaven and Earth, and create a strong and powerful existence amidst the rising chaos that our planet is experiencing more and more each minute. It is our chaos, growing in its presence simply because it must as more and more of us choose to leave behind the rational world that has been forced upon us. To stand outside of time, and hold these newly arriving energies we are bringing back from our dreams, is walking the path of the ancients and the Goddesses.

Each of us has the ability and the opportunity to walk this bridge, to stand firm on this newly minted soil filled with the sands of ancient wisdom. It is embodying the Illogical, the out-of-mind, the lunatical, and it is the only way to proceed when trying to truly honor the dreams of our nighttime journeys that are no longer residing solely in that world. They are manifesting here, now, in the dayworld that archetypal psychologist James Hillman so firmly describes in his work, and the Sufi scholar Henri Corbin poetically serves to us in his analysis of 12th century Sufi stories. In walking this bridge between Heaven and Earth in our dayworld, we continually strengthen our relationship with that “other” world, invoking our intention to use the gifts of the night—our dreams—for our upliftment, and the upliftment of those in our community. This is the way it works, much like a Frequent Flyer program: the more you fly, the more points you earn for such fantastic gifts and bonuses. I’ve always loved flying for free, and ladies and gentlemen, the more you walk this bridge between Heaven and Earth, the more you honor these dreaming energies and plant them under your feet, you begin to rack up amazing opportunities to redeem the most outrageous gifts as a Frequent Flyer, and it’s as illogical as anything the most wackiest of dreams could give you. Sign up now!

Illogical psychology says your synchronicities should trip over one another, occurring not in random order but in such meaningful ways that you not only expect them, but you realize the more they happen, the stronger that bridge becomes between Heaven and Earth. You see how real Illogical Occurrences are, and you applaud them, dance in them, soak in them, and laugh yourself silly in their magnificence. This is the wonder of leaving the rational world behind, that space that has now overgrown its benefit to Mankind like weeds overtaking your most beautiful garden. Moving out of that world of death and decay, you find yourself illogically positioned in the splendor of your wildest dreams and fantasies, mostly because you haven’t been able to imagine them. Henri Corbin writes in his 1964 epic essay, Mundus Imaginalis:

It is certainly a world that remains beyond the empirical verification of our sciences. Otherwise, anyone could find access to it and evidence for it. It is a suprasensory world, insofar as it is not perceptible except by the imaginative perception, and insofar as the events that occur in it cannot be experienced except by the imaginative or imaginant consciousness.

We’ve known this world as separate from our experience in the here-and-now, but we’ve advanced as a human body, now, into a space where that world and this are now overlapping, intertwined in our desire to transcend these prison-like limitations within this current framework of existence. This world “beyond the empirical verification” has always been available to us in our dreams and visions, but I say leave behind the old ways that have limited our perception and stand firm on the ground you are now creating through the dreams and visions that have left their moorings “over there.” They are available to us in “this” world, in “this” space, and believe me, your Frequent Flyer points will amass quicker than you can say “Nipsey Russell.” Heaven Help You if you trust what you can’t define; Heaven Help You if you listen, pay attention, and trust; for if you do, you’ll know what I mean by a Psychology of the Illogical, and you might just praise it, too, laughing along with your body as it experiences more of this bridge between Heaven and Earth.

Galveston Texas and the Threat of a Hurricane

Can we as human beings actually “predict” the future? Is it possible that we can be “in tune” with the totality of the plant that we can “sense” events before they arrive, much in the sense that animals can “sense” the Earth changes before they happen? I say we are able to access this knowledge, and our dreams and intuitions are the messengers for this knowledge.

Science is beginning to bring these possibilities into their realm of fact, although esoteric and indigenous wisdom has always held such possibilities as “fact.” Here’s something from the 1960’s “channeled” material of Jane Roberts and her book The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events (1981/1995) and something we’re experiencing in these days:

Through your mundane conscious choices, you affect all of the events of your world, so that the mass world is the result of multitudinous individual choices. You could not make choices at all if you did not feel impulses to do this or that, so that choices usually involve you in making decisions between various impulses. Impulses are urges toward action. Some are conscious and some are not. Each cell of your body feels the impulse toward action, response, and communication. . . . And as you will see, those impulses of a private nature are nevertheless also based upon the greater situation of the species and the planet, so that “ideally” the fulfillment of the individual would automatically lead to the better good of the species. (p. 239)

It’s like being in a highly charged meditative state and you can sense the movement of everything, and it is in that space you can see the totality of it all; the cohesive organization of all movement, regardless of the movement. It’s a beautiful thing.

Seth, through Jane Roberts, also says this:

Each person’s thoughts flow into that formation, forming part of the earth’s psychic atmosphere. From that atmosphere flows the natural earthly patterns from which your seasons emerge with all of their varieties and effects. You are never victims of natural disasters, though it may seem that you are, for you have your hand in forming them. You are creatively involved in the earth’s cycles. No one can be born for you, or die for you, and yet no birth or death is really an isolated event, but one in which the entire planet participates. (p. 31)

In this way, why would we not sense an impending disaster, since we, in effect, created it? If we are indeed “cleaning” our psychic garbage, “healing” our psychic wounds—individually and collectively—then our planet will be responding to our call and intent for this cleansing. We are the planet. We have limited our beliefs of who we are to this physical body, this spacesuit, in which we walk the planet—but we are more. Our dreams show this. So as the energies of the planet continue to accelerate, the opportunity for Gaia to cleanse herself, and us, too, heightens.

The Mayan calendar as interpreted by physicist Carl Joseph Calleman indicates 2007 as being a year—similar to November, 2004 through November, 2005—which should be climatologically intense. We have already seen that since November with earthquakes and tsunamis in the Asian countries, and the strong winter throughout the East Coast and Middle America. Hurricane season is arriving, and it is this type of “disaster” that I have been seeing in my dreams.

As early as last August, I was “seeing” effects of hurricane damage for this summer, specifically in Galveston, Texas. Being born and raised in Texas, this is a close and personal dream for me, since I am quite intimate with Galveston. Would such a dream indicate my inner psychological process? Perhaps. However, as I phoned a resident of Galveston the morning after that dream, she informed me she, too, had that very same “intuition.” I had a “vision” of such a weather-related event again a month later while taking part in visionary work in Florianôpolis, Brasil. Then, this past winter, I once again dreamt of a hurricane striking Galveston, Texas, this summer.

What do we do with such information? If an individual has such a dream, do we write it off as being “fantasy?” If others have those dreams, too, is that just “mass mania?” It is difficult to interpret such dreams, for very often they represent a part of our individual psyche that is being cleansed, or even overwhelmed in a psychological sense. Many people over the last two years have had “tsunami dreams,” “flood dreams,” and dreams involving cataclysms involving water. These are, for sure, representative of individual psychological movement, for the psyche is a very fluid and dynamic body. Yet, on some level, they do represent the collective, and how the collective body of humanity—and the planet—is undergoing a very strong cleansing in these days. And without a doubt, water is the source par excellence for healing and cleansing.

I was intrigued after the Hurricane Katrina tragedy in how my own dreams had related to New Orleans in advance of the hurricane. I’d dreamt of being in the French Quarter several months before the hurricane, and of movement on that land. Another dream in advance of the storm placed me in another part of New Orleans, yet it said nothing about a hurricane or impending disaster—and believe me, New Orleans is not a city I dream about. Was I tuning in to the upcoming disaster, or was I dreaming into the collective?

By “dreaming into the collective,” I mean becoming aware of a collective process in the dreaming. It is as though we as a human species dream together. We are linked energetically as individuals and as a composite human body. And as we physically vote at the polls for our elected officials, it is as though we also “vote” within the psychic space of our collective human body in how this planet and events on the planet proceed. So it is quite possible I was bringing back images and symbols in the dreaming of a process that was actually taking place, the energetic awareness of the creation of that hurricane.

One might be considered a heretic or lunatic to think that we actually create disasters—but what did the Jane Roberts quote mention? “You are never victims of natural disasters, though it may seem that you are, for you have your hand in forming them,” (p. 31). I know, this is not material from a scientific perspective, but if one considers quantum physics and their hypothesis regarding the unity of our planet.

Philosopher and scientist Ervin Laszlo contends that there is a “unified field” of existence known as the Akashic Field, which he says in Science and the Akashic Field (2004) “informs all things with all other things.” He writes:

Through the holograms created in and conveyed by the A-field, things are directly “in-formed” by the things that are most like them. For example, an amoeba is directly informed by other amoebas. This does not mean that things that are unlike one another would not be mutually informed. They are so informed, but the informational effect is not equally evident in all cases. . .. We are directly informed by fellow humans, yet we are also informed, though less directly, by animals, plants, and all of nature. Information conveyed through the A-field subtly tunes all things to all other things and accounts for the coherence we find in the cosmos, as well as in living nature. (p. 108)

It is my contention that there we each have the ability to return from our dreams with conscious knowledge of the Universe, for our dreams are like our morning newspapers, giving us a complete rendering of our personal lives, and the life of the planet. Whether we are in tune with that news and are able to “read” it is an individual ability. We are able to bring back dream images and symbols that relate to events occurring on the planet, because the energies of those events are a part of us. They are not alien. And as we are witnesses to those events, we are creators of them as well.

English philosopher Stanley Messenger writes in The Sacred Landscape (1988):

Each of us is an individualized point within a much larger planetary awareness in which each plays a unique role. Just as a liver cell or white blood corpuscle finds its meaning only in the context of a more comprehensive organism, so we ourselves find our true meaning when we emerge into the light of an entity able at last to say of the awakening earth: “This is My Body. This is My Blood.” (p. 43)

Will a hurricane strike Galveston this summer? I imagine it is highly possible. Yet, like anyone who has spent time in Las Vegas knows, probabilities are always changing. I imagine, too, that the movement of Gaia this summer will be forceful, cleansing, and intent on removing antiquated energies from the psychic space we all share, as humans and as a living, breathing planet. If humans will do their “homework” and listen to their dreams and their bodies, then, perhaps, we can avoid any type of major planetary disasters now, or in the future. But that’s up to each one of us to wake up and listen.

Hello, Brasil!

We are always keeping track of world events, especially those in Brasil. It seems as if the Jungian community continues to grow, with an interest in returning to our more "natural" psychic relationship with the world around us.

Our Jungian friends at Rubedo.com in Rio de Janeiro are featuring Archetypal Psychology articles from around the world, including an article from yours truly....http://www.rubedo.psc.br/inicio.htm

Mr. Marcus Quintaes is the director of this program, and he is a leading Brasilian psychologist working with the ideas of James Hillman and Carl Jung.

I'm preparing to add to my research on the Orixas, specifically Lemenja, or Yemenja, the Afro-Brasilian goddess of the sea. Why are Americans dreaming of this goddess? She certainly doesn't come from the Greek or Roman pantheon of gods and goddesses, and wasn't discussed in ANY of my classes in Mythology in university or graduate school courses. Let's see what's hiding behind this!