Personal Dreams

The first three types of dreaming are personal in nature. They give the dreamer specific information about her waking reality and how her life process is unfolding.

Mundane dreaming involves reworking things that didn't get done before you went to bed. Mundane dreams finish tasks, redo conversations that were unsatisfactory, rearrange the elements and energies of the day or of the immediate past.

When a dreaming woman has a mundane dream, it means she is too tired. Her days are exhausting and the fatigue is preventing her from going into the more subtle dreaming realms.

Psychological Dreaming

This is the dreaming that imparts information about your personal incarnational patterns. Mythological dreams, archetypal dreams, dreams that are giving you data about what you are working on in your own evolutionary movement all fall into this category. Psychological dreams are pointing you toward your own ultimate evolutionary destiny.

We don't often work with psychological dreams in dream circle (because the more appropriate place for that is in therapy or in a therapy group), although sometimes they come up. When they do, we use them as an opportunity to articulate information that liberates the dreamer and sends her toward her destiny. We emphasize movement. We do not point out in dream circle how the dreamer is stuck, or whether she is doing anything "wrong" -- we never say "you should." This is not the arena for that.

Lucid Dreaming

Lucid dreaming occurs when the dreamer becomes aware of the dreaming in the dream. This results in conscious choices: one can choose to affect the direction of the dream and one can choose to what degree to do that. It is very helpful in a fearful or traumatic dream to become lucid and to realize that the dreamer can shift the energy, or that she can take responsibility for the energy of that dream.

However, it's not a goal to control the dreaming. It's very important to learn to use lucid dreams as a way of becoming aware of the dreaming. We don't encourage the dreamer to awaken the personal ego within the dreamtime, which is what happens when the dreamer starts making his or her own decisions within a dream. At that point, it ceases to be an activity of spiritual proportion, and begins to be an exercise in control.

In general, lucid dreaming enhances the experience of the dream and blends the waking and sleeping realities in an almost ideal way, especially when the dreamer simply allows the dream to unfold without intervening with personal will.