We are all endlessly fascinated by the meaning of dreams. For me, dreams are a portal between the everyday world and the world of spirit. The dreamscape also holds clues about the layers of consciousness between our individual selves and the “great self”.
If life is another layer of dreaming, how can we become lucid dreamers in our daytime dreaming?
What is the Dreamscape?
The dreamscape is one dimension in which we can see consciousness expressing itself. Imagine the landscape of our nighttime dreams as an empty theatre stage on which we play out stories. On the stage we can assume a character and explore our own internal connection with life.
Shakespeare put it best when he said “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts.” This is also true in the world of nighttime dreams! In the dreamscape play, we are all the characters and all the symbols.
The tornado
Recently I’ve been having a recurring dream that has given me a new awareness for our personal relationship with our own intuition. The dream goes like this. I’m travelling somewhere and I’m with the tribe. Suddenly, I sense that a tornado is coming. I look up, and see it on the horizon. I gather everyone together, and tell them to leave the existing structures and flee into the open fields of nature. I tell them it’s going to be all right but they have to steady themselves for the storm.
When the tornado blows through my dreamscape, it destroys everything in sight – except the tribe. When the storm has passed, people stand up and dust themselves off, shocked but basically okay.
Then I wake up.
Symbols
I’ve long recognized that this dream comes from the part of my psyche that senses the evolving transformation of consciousness. It is a symbolic description of the destruction of the existing structures in order to create space for something new to form.
It’s more complex than that, though. If I dive into a deeper dimension of the dream, I can feel that I’m also a playing with the different aspects of my character that I may be using in order to fit into the culture around me. The dream is reminding me to let go of the illusion of the social structures I’m leaning on and to step into the safety of the chaotic unknown of nature.
Between the borders
Another layer of the dreamscape shines a light on our innate connection to our intuition. I recently experienced this through a new dimension to the tornado dream.
I’d been in the remote bushveld of South Africa for some months, oblivious to what was happening in the outside world. Throughout the week before I was due to return to the States, I was having the tornado dream several times a night. It was so relentless that I almost wasn’t surprised to learn on the day I returned home that a huge number of tornados had been ravaging the middle of the US, creating untold destruction.
These events left me with a question I’ve often asked myself. Are our dreams merely stories reflecting the workings of our psyche? Do they offer symbolic insights about what’s happening in the larger collective consciousness? Or do they contain practical intuitive messages about what’s to come in the “daytime dream”?
I’ve come to believe that the answer is “yes” – to all three questions.
I believe that the dreamscape – the world we visit when we fall asleep – is just one layer of dreaming, and that the intelligence of life is whispering to us through all the layers. Picture three concentric circles, with the nighttime dream in the centre, contained within the daytime dream that is our daily life. The largest circle holds both of these dreamings. This layer of dreaming is the Great Dream, the spiritual dream; it is where the mystery resides.
When you pay close attention to the messages and symbols from your dreams, you’re likely to notice that certain images and patterns from your dreams begin to appear in your daytime life, and vice-versa. It’s fascinating. I believe that the borders between these different layers of dreaming are not absolute, and some symbols naturally flow between them. It’s a beautiful thing to witness when it starts to happen, and offers us a doorway through which we can glimpse our own nature, which we could call “psychic” or “intuitive” but is really just about waking up to the dream that we are held within.
A lucid dreamer is one who becomes aware that they are dreaming and chooses to play within the dreamscape. In the same way it is possible to become lucid within your life, tuning into the subtle intuitive whispers that are always reaching across the boundaries of time and space and through the ether to touch all the different layers of yourself.
Try taking a moment this week to journal your dreams. Give yourself 15 extra minutes in bed in the morning to simmer in your dreams as you make that transition from your nighttime dreaming into that of the day. Take a note or two and any symbols you can recall. Then listen for the moments in your life when those symbols and sensations repeat themselves in the daytime dream. You may be amazed to discover that you are intuiting more information about what’s to come then you ever thought was possible.