Does lucid dream restoration have an impact? I'll be doing more research into the practice of dreaming a balanced world. My sense is that people have done this for ages, and we've forgotten about it for a while. Last night I was reading in Healing Dreams by Marc Ian Barasch accounts of people healing their own bodies in lucid dreams. Here's an example recounted by a woman with debilitating plantar warts on her feet:
"'I am walking through [...] a museum... I think of my feet because they are hurting as I walk. I sit down on a wooden cube. Then I remember I can heal my feet. A ball of white light I had been visualizing before sleep appears around my hands. I put my hands on my right foot, and the light enters it, glowing golden from within. I hold it there for several seconds, then move to the left foot. Same process. It seems amazing and terrifying. The feeling is so intense that I wake up with my heart pounding.'
The next morning, the woman was surprised to feel no pain upon walking. She checked her warts and discovered they had uniformly turned black overnight. All fell off within ten days."
-p. 77
If one person can heal her body, I don't see why many of us can't heal the Earth.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Friday, October 30, 2009
Lucid Dreaming for the Earth
Welcome to Lucid Dreaming for the Earth! The purpose of this project is to make use of our lucid dreams for the betterment of the world. Together we can weave the fabric of the dream world to help support a balanced waking world, where habitats thrive with native wildlife, rivers run clean, and the air is pure.
I will use my own lucid dreams to illustrate what I mean by lucid dreaming for the Earth. But before I provide clear examples, I'd like to offer a few guidelines for how I treat the dreams. You're welcome to use them.
Now let's dream!
I will use my own lucid dreams to illustrate what I mean by lucid dreaming for the Earth. But before I provide clear examples, I'd like to offer a few guidelines for how I treat the dreams. You're welcome to use them.
- Honor the spirit of the dream. Maintain its power by speaking about your dream with respect and care.
- Keep part of the dream for yourself in order to protect yourself and retain your power. Trust your instinct about what to share and what not to share.
- Respect the privacy of other dreamers. Dream sharing is an exchange. Please hold other people's dreams with integrity rather than voyeurism.
- Acknowledge your "big dreams" by making offerings those who have come to you. Make art, give a traditional offering from your culture, or say thank you another way.
- Give your dreams time to unfold. Dreams can take years to unfold, so be patient if the meaning of your dream is not immediately clear to you.
- Heed your dreams in waking life. Take action when appropriate to integrate and anchor your dreams into the waking world.
- Recognize elements of your dreams that show up in waking life so that these two aspects of life become more seamless.
- Learn the stories of your indigenous ancestors and of the ancestors whose land you inhabit. Our dreaming and waking lives can tell us what histories we are enacting if we know the stories and symbols that reside in our blood and our land.
- If you have a dream for another person, share it with him or her when appropriate. Don't be attached to the result of this sharing.
- Maintain respect for who or what you encounter in a lucid dream or out-of-body experience. The dream world is the real world.
Now let's dream!
It'll Take Some Rain
Here is a lucid dream I had two nights ago:
I'm in a subdivision with very manicured lawns, where everything looks the same, and nothing seems wild. I see two people walking by. One is walking a dappled goose. One is walking three polar bears. I say, "How do we bring back wildlife (to areas such as these)?" The woman walking the polar bear says, "It'll take some rain." I get the sense that she means a Noah-caliber rain. We are all on a corner where there is a big puddle or small pond. The animals are swimming in it.
I'm in a subdivision with very manicured lawns, where everything looks the same, and nothing seems wild. I see two people walking by. One is walking a dappled goose. One is walking three polar bears. I say, "How do we bring back wildlife (to areas such as these)?" The woman walking the polar bear says, "It'll take some rain." I get the sense that she means a Noah-caliber rain. We are all on a corner where there is a big puddle or small pond. The animals are swimming in it.
Bringing Back the Buffalo
This is my first act of conservation to take place in a lucid dream. It happened last night:
I'm walking down the steps of my house, which is on a cliff. I jump off the balcony and hover down to the canyon below. I want to pray this prayer while standing on the ground. I begin praying for the buffalo, the salmon, the wolves, and the bears to come back. I acknowledge that I am just one tiny person, but that my prayer is sincere. Then I start to speak to the spirits of these animals themselves, asking them to please come back.
image from http://4.bp.blogspot.com/
I'm walking down the steps of my house, which is on a cliff. I jump off the balcony and hover down to the canyon below. I want to pray this prayer while standing on the ground. I begin praying for the buffalo, the salmon, the wolves, and the bears to come back. I acknowledge that I am just one tiny person, but that my prayer is sincere. Then I start to speak to the spirits of these animals themselves, asking them to please come back.
image from http://4.bp.blogspot.com/
Cleaning Up
Last night I had the following lucid dream:
I am walking through another cookie-cutter subdivision. I see a truck coming by, and I put my hand up, motion for it to pull over. I see there's dreamcatcher on the rear view mirror. Three guys hop out of the truck. I see trash in this neighborhood. I tell them we should pick it up. When they ask why, I say, "because this is the dreamworld, and everything originates from the dreamworld. So, if we clean it up here, we'll be cleaning up the other world, too." They agree, and together we collect a big bag of trash.
When I "woke up" from the dream, I immediately thought of a particularly trashed area in my neighborhood, and I knew I needed to clean it up today, to integrate this dream into the waking world. (I wanted to respect the dream by taking action.) Here are some before and after pictures from this, my first act of environmental lucid dreaming.
I am walking through another cookie-cutter subdivision. I see a truck coming by, and I put my hand up, motion for it to pull over. I see there's dreamcatcher on the rear view mirror. Three guys hop out of the truck. I see trash in this neighborhood. I tell them we should pick it up. When they ask why, I say, "because this is the dreamworld, and everything originates from the dreamworld. So, if we clean it up here, we'll be cleaning up the other world, too." They agree, and together we collect a big bag of trash.
When I "woke up" from the dream, I immediately thought of a particularly trashed area in my neighborhood, and I knew I needed to clean it up today, to integrate this dream into the waking world. (I wanted to respect the dream by taking action.) Here are some before and after pictures from this, my first act of environmental lucid dreaming.
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