I mentioned #ActiveDreaming in my intro and I thought I should explain that a little in case others are looking for an approach to #Dreamwork that goes beyond the psychological approach, or the idea of "dream dictionaries" of canned meanings that always apply in every case.

Forty-plus years ago there was an effort to take dreamwork out of the hands of professionals and put it back into the hands of dreamers. Patricia Garfield and Jeremy Taylor wrote, practiced, organized and advocated for dreamers claiming the power of their dreams and they wrote excellent books on the topic. Before encountering them I had delved deeply into Jane Roberts' (and Seth's) writing on dreams and the special techniques they described. Two decades ago I stumbled upon Robert Moss and his writings about his Active Dreaming approach, which has become one of my best dreamworking toolkits. (He is still out there teaching it, too.)

The 'Active' part comes from Jung's idea of Active Imagination. As I understand it this is a technique for using the powers of imagination to converse with the deeper layers of the self. Moss developed a number of approaches for applying this specifically to dreaming. Most importantly, to my mind, using shamanic journeying techniques to reenter dreams, either one's own dreams or the dreams of another. This enables a powerful direct interaction with the dreamer's own dream images. You can go back to a dream and ask that talking mongoose what is it there for!

All of these teachers share the foundation for journaling dreams consistently, building some kind of relationship with your dreams by acknowledging them and interacting with them, and for group dream sharing as a way to deepen understanding of our dreams. With that kind of basis, all kinds of dreamwork can be done. In my current dream group we not only share dreams and work on what they could be bringing us individually and as a group, but we also work with dream incubation, doing group dream travel to places in space and time we'd find hard to visit in waking life. For instance, we did a bunch of dreams to Oumuamua when it was passing through the solar system, which were very mysterious.

All of this dreamwork leads one into interesting personal research. It has led me to #Synesius of Cyrene, student of the legendary Hypatia. Around the year 405 Synesius wrote a book titled "On Dreams" where he goes into great detail on the nature of dreams. To Synesius we are composed of both Mind and Soul, or Matter and Spirit. The Mind contains images of what is, the Soul of what will be. We also have a third part, the Imagination, where dreams occur or exist, a part that connects the Mind to Soul and thus provides a path to the Divine. "The imagination has the senses available, but not the organs of perception. Thus the imagination may be perceiving something more pure. When sleep makes a connection to the soul this brings us close to our source."

I like that he is saying that Imagination is a larger part of us and is the part that connects us to things outside the material world. It resonates with my experience and seems to be a more accurate picture of the world that just the mind/body dualism running around the world these days. Anyway, I'm always open to discussing dreams.