How to Enter Dreaming

Where is the flow of life, and what happens if you give awareness, love, and energy to it?

Dreaming is a practice of View.

Dreaming is a View that sees all of life as Creativity: Life and Being is Unconditioned Creativity. Taking this View, we have experiences that confirm the View and strengthen it, allowing us to relax further into View.

We are not trying to get to Dreaming: we are already Dreaming.

This View includes your Identity, but is not confined to it. So, when you feel like you have a ‘knot’ in your life, find the intelligence behind it. How has the block actually served you (your Identity)? What Activity of yours can you own that brings this knot into Life?
 
All of this manifest world is a result of this Creativity, a Creativity without Identity itself. We take the View that what we are ‘underneath it all’ is no different than the Creative Force that brings everything about. You can call this whatever you like — whether it’s divine, or natural (I have a preference for a ‘neither/nor + both/and’; in other words, an “all-at-once” interpretation) — but the point is, what you are emerges from that, and so includes you. You can relax your own individual identity enough to the point that you recognize this in your own experience.

Working with View is the central practice of Dreaming. Or: Dreaming is the only and central practice of Dreaming. You’re already doing it. So assume that you are, give that sense awareness, love, and energy, and see what happens. Rather than finding your Power, you assume that everything in your life is an expression of Power. How can that be?

There are of course more traditional and practical practices to aid with this, practices that come from Shamanic traditions, Spiritual and Religious lineages, Western psychology, and from modern research into what makes for an effective, happy, and meaningful life.

What in your environment is energizing — what items or objects around you are exciting? Seem to be calling to you? Seem to be alive themselves?

The main of these is being able to recognize the experience of Dreaming, and closely related to this is the ability to sense the presence of Juice, or Creative Energy, in yourself, in your relationship to the world around you, and in the world around you.

It’s not itself an emotion, a sense, or a feeling, but something like the saturation of emotion, sense, or feeling. The world is a little sharper, feels a little more open. The edge is not as easy to find, a veil or filter seems to have been lifted. Life is closer, immediate. Both more real, and more surreal.

But this experience is secondary to View. The idea is to be able to access this experience directly in the flavor or texture of (any) experience.

I call this non-dual Creativity. What’s the Creative impulse underneath the way you see and divide the world up? What includes you as a(n apparent) subject, and the world you live in?

Where is the flow of life, and what happens if you give awareness, love, and energy to it? Find that flow, find that life, and enter into it. See what in your environment (you can do this right now) is energizing — when you look at your desk, or your car, or wherever you are, what items or objects around you are exciting? Seem to be calling to you? Seem to be alive themselves? Let yourself be entirely surprised by this.

How are you feeling, right now? Resist the urge to name this experience, and simply follow it with your open and curious attention.

Follow the flow of energy where it’s taking you — as a wholeness of being — and simply be present to what happens when you play with it. Rather than pushing through, say, fear — can you be intensely curious about the experience itself? About the energy of the experience?

This is relevant right now. Are you slogging through this website, or this post? Then stop! Go away! Do something else! This is always relevant.

How are you feeling, right now? Resist the urge to name this experience, and simply follow it with your open and curious attention. Pay attention to the subtle tendencies and impulses of the moment. How does your body want to move? In what direction are you impelled when you just simply stop for a moment?

Actual Creative disciplines are also helpful, or finding what is technically called “Flow,” though I use the word a little differently. “Flow” is a good way of finding activities that strengthen your Dreaming, but is usually, and for most of us, context-dependent. “Flow” advocates recommend that you spend as much time in the activities that bring you to Flow as you can — I think this is wise. But Dreaming is an invitation to recognize Dreaming, to recognize the flow of life, in a non-, or cross-contextual way. Can you be Dreaming not just when you’re skiing, but when you’re washing the dishes? Overly focusing on the positive contexts in which we can already Flow can be a distraction from the underlying Activity of Dreaming. Dreaming is not context-dependent.

So get outside of your context! Walk down a different street. Follow the flow of the city (as the situationists practiced.) Stand on a street corner and just wait for something interesting. Sit on a different side of the room — sleep in a different place on your bed, or on your couch. Try to access the feeling-sense of flow in the least likely of places. Just try it out! Experiment!

Find Life and Dreaming objects in the world. I often recommend that people I work with find a “Dreaming Totem:” some object in their lives — or that they ‘see’ in the days and weeks after our session — that stands as a sort of partner in Dreaming, that calls them as a reminder of their Dreaming, that they can see and be recalled to Dreaming.

Risk: nothing enlivens us like taking risks. I don’t mean giant, life-changing or threatening risks — though these have their place — I mean experiments of the right scope, where what you’ll learn if it doesn’t go the way you hope is as valuable as what you’re risking. Share with someone that you find them attractive. Tell a friend you’re upset that he hasn’t reached out in 6 months. Ignore someone’s diatribe at work that would normally pull you into a half hour of draining discussion.

This is all generalized, and is really here to suggest ways of playing around with this yourself, since this, on the ground, will be different for everyone.

For the curious: this is one piece of a larger hyper-article.

If you’re interested in exploring and experiencing this, you can sign up for a session here — (sessions last two hours.) [If you haven’t had one already, it’s free!]