Photo by Ben

I’ve noticed before how my intentions with my own dreams often strike back in clever ways.

For instance, when I was readily working with Calea Zacatechichi, it’s powers alluded me, even mocked me. I would have dreams about taking dream herbs instead of having lucid dreams or crazy vivid dreams! Ha! Oh Calea Z…

Anyhow – I wanted to share a dream today that’s about having a hole in my palm.

This comes from the fact that one of my favorite means of reality testing, and by extension, testing the reality (or lack thereof) in the dream world, is putting my hands through things and putting a finger from my left hand into my right palm, or vice versa. (As I type this out it sounds a lot creepier than it is when I actually do it in a dream, which is that context is like striking gold.)

This is a great method for reality testing because you can do this no matter where you are, in any context, in both the dream world and in waking life.

I had a dream that tied into this method for reality testing, which is both clever and maddening at once. It hints at some kind of intelligence operating within our dreaming minds, unconscious or irrelevant to our intentions.

Here’s what I wrote down in my dream journal:

I’ve got this hole in my left hand. It’s not huge, but it’s there, and it’s kinda freaking me out. I mean, maybe I should see a doctor about it! Couldn’t it get infected? I look it up online and find some dumbass who posted on Yahoo! Answers something about a hole in his hand, complete with an obviously doctored photo of his hand with a big hole in it.

After this post, the responses included many beautiful pieces of art that were created in the shape of a hand. For instance, ballerinas or dancing figures, that overall are in the shape of a hand.

I realize if I take a picture of my hand, it’s going to be hard to see the hole. The palm side of the hole is larger than the top of my hand, which is sort of black around the edges of the hole.

I realize one thing I can do is shine a laser through it! So I shine a laser through it, putting this large flashlight-like device over the top of my hand, cupping it, and then it comes out in a laser beam from my palm, down towards the bathroom counter. I’m showing N and someone else this, in my bathroom, and they think it’s a magic trick.

It’s not, and it actually seals up the hole mostly, causing it to burn like hell and bleed a bit too.

I added the following commentary about this dream that morning:

Note: Hilarious that I dream of a hole in my hand when everyday i do reality checks counting my fingers, sometimes followed up by imagining a hole in my hand and/or trying to put a finger through my palm.

It’s almost like inside of all our heads, there’s a little shaman dream prankster, ready to push back when we overly get attached to setting a certain intention with a dream – whether it be a dream sign or getting to excited about the idea of using a dream herb to have vivid dreams or lucid dreams.

Why do you think it is that it works like this? What’s going on here when our dreams mock our intentions to work with them?

Art by Ben | Copyright 2010 | Dreaming Life

Lots of people have their personal nightmare; you know, the one that re-occurs overs the years, the one that horrifies them to the core, even if sometimes it doesn’t seem very scary when talking about it.

Mine is something most people are familiar with: the 1970′s horror film, The Exorcist.

When I was 10 years old I saw The Exorcist. It was on TV and I watched it with my brothers. Not wanting to look weak in front of them, I acted brave; oh no, this movie doesn’t scare me!

The truth is, it scared the living shit out my 10 year old self. I vividly remember being scared of possession, so much that I  purposely slept in a crooked position because of those scenes in The Exorcist where they showed her body floating in the air, possessed, straight as a nail. I thought if I slept straight I would be more susceptible to demon possession.

This fear slowly dissipated in its intensity over the years; but instead of becoming something I ignorantly feared, it just turned into a fear deep in my head, somewhere. The only place it had to come out was my dreams. You know, that wonderful place where logic doesn’t apply so well like it does it the real world to contain our fears.

That little girl from The Exorcist has now appeared in my dreams for years, making many a guest appearance. The dreams are some of scariest I’ve ever had. It did not help that last year I read the book – which, mind you, I thought was a brilliantly written piece of fiction, and by far the most elegantly disturbing horror novel I’ve ever read – but reading this book absolutely planted her little seed in my head again and she made quite a few appearances in that time frame.

I thought it’d be interesting to share one of those dreams. This dream is special in that it also includes someone whom I have much admiration for, a friend named Juan who wrote about his experiences in Peru under a shaman and allowed me to share it on Dreaming Life for which I’m very thankful. His appearance in this dream is very intriguing to me. (You can read more about his experiences here.)

Here’s what I wrote in my dream journal in February 2009 about a dream with Juan and the demon from The Exorcist. In ths dream, she is in the next room chained to a bed when I get something from Juan in the mail and then have to into her room for some reason.

I’ve received a package in the mail from Juan. It contains various shamanic plants, including ayahausca. His letter says we must have the girl come stay with him immediately or she will die. He will perform a shamanic ritual in order to save her. But the thing is, I know she is already dead.

I have to go through her room to get something. I am terribly scared of her. I walk through her room and she watches; intently, intelligently.

I do not make eye contact, but I can feel her eyes on me. I am pulled into returning her stare.

She’s lying on the bed. Her face is pale, with blue and white rings. She is terrifying to witness.

There is an electrifying, intelligent look in her face beyond the years of a young girl.

I wake up in fear.

I added after this some commentary:

The energy of the little girl – the demo – was so sharp, so focused – her eyes were on my like a wild animal stalking its prey. And the color of her skin, a pale blue and white blended together, similar to the color contrasts I’ve been using in my art. A visually and emotionally captivating dream experience. I finished reading the Exorcist book about 2 weeks ago – fascinating how the fear lurks in my mind and comes out so much later in this dream.

Isn’t it amazing how something we saw that scared as children can haunt is our dreams as adults?

Much in the same way of what I wrote about recently in that there’s a goddess archetype that developed in my dreams over the years, this demonic little girl from the Exorcist has become a kind of reoccurring nightmare concept that has appeared in my dreams on and off for more than a decade.

It gives me the creeps just writing about it and thinking about her.

Photo By Colleen | Copyright 2010

False awakenings are one of those gifts from the dream gods.

Ever so strange, even eerie, and somewhat rare in the grand scheme of dreaming – although I think everybody has one at one point or another.

A couple years ago, in an attempt to induce a lucid dream, I had a series of repeated false awakenings. It’s crazy how many I had – 4 in total – one right after another!

Here’s what I wrote in my dream journal that morning.

Dream Journal: April 23 2007

Slept in about 2 hours longer than I need to try and have a lucid dream…

had strange dreams where I had false wakenings instead.
I’m in bed with IL and I wake up and IL is there; I tell her to describe to me what’s happened this morning. She can’t. I realize it’s because the memories I have of us getting up already and doing this are just dreams. Somehow this doesn’t lead me to realize I am dreaming though.

then another false wakening dream…
IL comes to bed to wake me up and bring me the mail. I’ve got some shirts and other things. She’s excited to give me a letter from Rob Bryanton, author of Imagining the 10th Dimension. He writes to me ‘So I’m in Toronto right now’ and I try to read the rest but I can’t I know I’m dreaming to some extent, and each page starts with ‘I’m in Toronto’ because my dreaming mind can’t come up with anything better. His letter was like 5 or 6 pages on oversized paper, written in ink, with doodles in the background. His handwriting was big and happy.

another false wakening dream…
I wake up and about to start shaving before I notice there’s a long patch of hair that’s already shaved off my beard. I don’t know how I did this! On top of that, I see gray hair coming into my beard to. I go to get IL to look at this and get her opinion. She sees the grey hair and the shaved spot. I make a joke about it and then something happens and I know it’s a dream. It’s a very weak unpowerful realization and leads to nothing else, save for the fact that I know my beard is, in fact, normal.

another false wakening dream…
I wake up and it’s pouring rain outside. This is strange since it’s supposed to be 80 degrees today. I notice there’s still blue skies in the distance. I see rainbows – thick rainbows, like you can grab them. I move and they move. I realize the rain might mess up my plans to go hiking.

A few observations:

• It seems the fact that I was forced myself to go back to bed after having woken up in the morning in real life was a huge factor in having several dreams where I woke up and started my day.
• It’s odd to me that each dream sequence of a false awakening is disconnected entirely from the one before it. It’s like each time my brain “reset” itself and starting over, dreaming and then falsely waking up.
• It’s too bad this didn’t lead to strong lucidity, even though I knew I was dreaming the first time I realized I hadn’t really woken up.
• It is really weird to have a false awakening over and over that has someone else in the dream who is really sleeping next to you and you normally get up with. It just seems so damn real each time with her in the dreams waking up with me or interacting with me once I (dreamed I) woke up. I felt like she was really there, ya know?
• The dream where I got a letter from Rob Bryanton, author the fantastic book Imagining the 10th Dimension, is great because I was in fact actually in the process of interviewing him for this blog. (You can read the Rob Bryanton interview here.)
• FYI I’ve had so many dreams where I look in the mirror and something is different: my hair, my beard, even my face. It’s something I should consider using as a dream sign since I dream about it a lot.
• Because I was able to so easily bring this experience about through going back to sleep after waking up, it’s something I’d like to try again to intentionally induce false awakenings, lucid dreams, or both.

What kind of weird false awakening experiences have you had?

Untitled Art by Ben | Copyright 2010 | Dreaming Life

Having a dream where you are simultaneous you but also someone else is such a strange yet common occurrence.

Here is a short dream I had where I was someone else not just once but twice, in the same dream. The first person I barely knew, he was  someone who helped spearhead some events I was a part of and the second one is a person nearly everyone on the planet knows – Homer Simpson. What a strange thing to merge the two.

Dream Journal: 7:32 PM 10/11/99

I’m R, the PFT organizer. I’ve cut myself in a horrible accident and am bleeding all the way from my hands to my shoulder on my right arm. I’m trying to hold down the skin broken around my elbow yet it’s just bulging with overflowing blood. I’m taken to a doctor and now I’m in The Simpsons. Every one is trying to convince Marge that she didn’t not to sew up my cut. I think I’m Homer.

This ability to be someone else in a dream is, frankly, entirely weird.

Whatever concept or dream logic that allows for this feat seems to be the same principle at work when you dream of going to your friends house, except it’s not your friends house but it is, or you dream of your coworker at work, but it’s actually your best friend, but its still your coworker. And so on, all the way on down to your own identify in the dream as being someone else, all the while this being just the way it is and nothing you or anyone gives any notice to as being odd.

I am fascinated by what mechanism is at work that allows for this to occur commonly in dreams.

I would love to hear your thoughts on what you think is happening or why this is such a common experience in dreams. Furthermore, if this is discussed in any scientific theories on dreaming you’re aware of, please share!

Art by Ben | Copyright 2010 | Dreaming Life

This is another dream from the vaults, the experience of which has always stood out in my mind. Only 1 person has ever read this dream – he told me his Mom did dream interpretation, so I sent him this dream, to which he was sheepishly responded it was really long and maybe another time she could interpret it. Ha! Anyhow, here’s a condensed version of it.

Dream Journal: 1:12 PM 9/19/99

I’m flying over the United States we a group of people. We see a small little town in the country and immediately swoop down into it. This experience of flying is amazing and the large areal views are astonishing.

We’re lying on a grassy hill, spying into someone’s home. It’s night time yet a lot of people are out. No one sees us, which is surprisingly since we’re so obviously hiding out looking like burglars.

We’re inside their home now. I’m standing on the counter. The house is full of chaos and tension – the people there are very fearful. The town is full of violence, and I scream out “Violence begets violence! This town will be overcome with locusts!”

At the same time, using sort sort of mental / magical power, I throw my left arm down and without touching him, I explode a mans head.

The entire town knows what’s going on and everyone is screaming, everyone is trying get away from the impending locusts.

I briefly consider my friends in this town who may die here because of the locusts, but cannot remember where they really live.

I’m in my chemical lab in high school. I’m with the same group of people I was flying with. We might actually be vampires. We are all very upset for some reason and make everything explode and then fly off at once. I’m planning on leaving the school and I think that I will have to disappear from this time forever. I see a few friends on my way out, give them a hug, and tell them I may not see them again.

At the same time, I hear people in a nearby classroom talking about us. I stick my head in and ask what they’re saying, and the teacher jokes that they heard we can fly. I laugh at this and then see another friend, hug him, tell him I may never see him again. I remember thought that I can check my email from anywhere in the world, so please email me! Then I fly off, then we all fly off, all 4 or or 5 of us, towards a field.

A few thoughts on this dream:

• I had graduated from high school only months before, so it’s interesting to see how I kept noting in this dream I was leaving my high school and hugging friends goodbye and telling them I may never see them again. What’s odd is my actual last day of high school was entirely anti-climatic. I saw nearly no one and told nearly no one goodbye. Perhaps this dream is a projection of my desire to have had a better last day of school!
• At this time in my life, I really, really loved the movie Interview with the Vampire. I was also very interested in weird Bible imagery like demons and whatnot, so the whole locusts things fits in well with that fascination. This is the main part of the dream that sticks with me to this day.
• I think it’s really odd that I shout something about violence begets violence and that locusts will overtake the town. This type of aggression is nearly completely absent in my real life.
• Beyond this idea of relating the dream to leaving high school, I have no idea what it means. It’s just a very weird dream. The flying aspect of it was fantastic. The only other dream I’ve had of flying that rival the experience are some of the flying lucid dreams I’ve had which were amazing.

Photo by Marisa

It’s rare that I have a dream whose meaning is so easily and obviously symbolic to what’s going on in my life in such blunt terms. This is one of the most literal dreams of that sort that I’ve had.  This dream is about problems my girlfriend (at the time) and I were having in our relationship.

Dream Journal:
6:56 am May 24, 1999

We’re outside of  a business. I’m arguing with an employee who then turns into A. I’m shouting and ranting and raving because of the bad service. Then A and I start throwing things at one another – drinks, food, even rocks and stones! We both get hurt, cutting one another with the things we’re throwing.

After running in circles and throwing shit at each other, I realize this is horrible! what are we doing?

Standing about 10 feet away, I raise my arms out. I briefly realize this may appear to be an invitation for target practice, but I was intending to motion for her to hug me.

She puts down her rock and goes to give me a hug, and then I can’t remember anything else.

This is perhaps one of the most easily symbolic dreams I’ve had and that’s why I like it. While so many dreams consist of that David Lynch-esque disconnect between what’s happening and why, this dream just smacks you in the face:

You and your girlfriend throwing rocks at each other! And then you realize wait, this is pointless, what are we doing? And then you move to embrace and comfort one another .

What’s also interesting about this dream is that she did work as a waitress and it was from a waitress character then she emerged into my girlfriend.

Also, just now something has come to me as I review this dream  11 years later.

I noted in my dream journal that the things we were throwing were leaving cuts on another. This is interesting because self mutilation and cutting was a topic between us and something of a problem for her, I’m sad to note. I never saw this additional layer of meaning in the dream. Very interesting.

Photo by Ben

Whenever I have a dream where I experience a small level of conscious awareness (or lucidity, if you will), and am able to think about the fact that I’m dreaming and do a few interesting things – often consisting of marveling at my hands and putting them through objects – when I wake up, I typically question the experience.

Was it a lucid dream?

Or what it a dream about a lucid dream?

This thought haunts me to be honest, because there are many “lucid dreams” where I question if they’re really true lucid dreams or just dreams of having lucid dreams.

Granted, I realize this sounds crazy – so for the love of god, if you’ve ever had this thought, please tell me! J

(To clarify, I’ve had dreams with a very, very strong level of awareness that I do not question at all as being anything but a real experience of being aware while dreaming. This insanely lucid dream for instance comes to mind. It’s just the low level lucid dreams that bother me.)

Anyhow, this relates to my dream below in the sense that back in 1999, on my 19 birthday according to the date in my dream journal, I had a very strange dream: one in which I dreamt I was astral traveling.

Here’s what I wrote down back then.

I’m standing in my room, astral traveling.

I knew I was really just dreaming, but I was really standing up.

I look at the window and think about jumping through it because it won’t matter; this is a dream.

At this moment, I wake up. I’m lying on the bed. I open my eye and know this feeling of WAKING, of separation, of coming back into reality.. this sensation was very felt. I’m confused, but amazed, but too tired to think clearly.

Then I wake up AGAIN and turn around in my sleep.

After this, in my dream journal I added the following:

What really happened to me was that I dreamt I was astral traveling, then dreamt I woke up from a dream where I was astral traveling, then woke up in real life. I remember waking up FOR REAL this time and thinking that I felt way too heavy and too tired to actually be walking around.

I do have the memory of standing next to my bed and at the same time, I could feel my arms asleep, and I was thinking “I’m not really awake right now.” However, I do not know if I was sleep walking or I dreamt of that.

I also remember, somewhere in this dream sequence, of dreaming up DREAM WORLDS where everything floated; it was a kind of spaceless land. No floor, no ceiling. Instead, there were flat, spherical stones as steps. It was like a comic book. I remember waking up, knowing that this was a dream world.

This dream also has the element of a false wakening, an experience that fascinates me! The earliest false awakening I can recall happened when I was about 7 years old, and I’ve had only a few since then; false awakenings are such a mind fuck, I treasure having them. And then with the dream above adding in elements of astral travel and lucidity, you can see why this dream has stuck with me even though it was more than a decade since I experienced it.

If you’ve had a similar experience or have any thoughts on this dream experience, I’d love to hear it.

Untitled By Ben. Copyright 2010 Dreaming Life

There is a woman who has appeared in my dreams for many, many years. A little while back, I realized she ceased to represent the person who she appears to be and had become a kind of archetype in my brain; a woman that represents some sort of ideal woman, a highly sexualized archetype, a kind of goddess almost.

In fact, in real life she had a very big “energy” or presence to her personality, style, and image, so this archetypal concept is not too far off to be honest.

So yes – she is based on a real person, a girl I had a huge crush on in high school – perhaps infatuation would be a better word, actually – but it’s no one that I’ve had any relationship with or even spoken to in about 12 years. But for the first 5 or 6 years after not having seen her, I had many dreams with her. In fact, it was almost like the energy of the archetype got bigger and bigger after having not seen her for 2 or 3 years – this was the period where she would regularly appear in my dreams, more so than any other period of my life after having met her.

Even now, a dozen or so years since having seen her, she still appears in my dreams, albeit only making the occasional guest appearance. I can only recall one off the top of my head a single dream with her from the last year. She was in a dream where – comically – I saw her driving a car on the beach, right on the sand, like it was no big deal to be doing such a ludicrous thing.

Out of all the dreams I ever had about her, there was one that was really strong, which is the dream I want to share today. I think I’ve thought about the experience so much that it’s taken on a sort of poetic license of its own, coming to be bigger than the dream itself. I now question my own memory of it; my thoughts about it have effected my memory of it, surely shaping it into something else. (Which is actually true of every memory every has on every experience, but…that’s for another post, another day.)

Anyhow, about 10 years ago I wrote down the dream and intended to publish it as part of the zine I did as a teenager. That issue never came out, and the dream has always remained in various zine-to-be notebooks, having never seen the light of day.

Here is a copy of what I wrote down back then. I’m 29 now, and I estimate i was 17 or 18 when I had the dream and wrote this in my dream journal.

She’s lying on the cave floor, arching her back, in the distance. The rave around us has become distant, a mere flashing of lights in a far-off corner, a beat to be heard as background music, acknowledged but not pulsating through my body. We are alone, made tiny by the largeness of the cave. Her ribs are poking up through her skin, her red hair is falling behind to the floor as she tilts her head back and exposes her neck. Thoughts of making love to her tonight flash through my mind. A large skull lies on the floor next to her; it’s phallic horns jutting into the air. I walk closer to her, and the look in her eyes is one of mere acknowledgement, not surprise.

If it’s not obvious, without being overtly sexual in content, this dream was still very, very sexual

I can still feel the experience of the dream so well – the pulsating lights, the arch of her back, the emptiness of the cave aside from our presence. It’s like I’ve watched it happen over and over.

I’ve often thought of collaborating with a close friend who does freelance video work and making a few short films out of my dreams; if that ever happens, this would go to the top of the list. I would love to direct my own dream.

Addendum:

One benefit of keeping a dream journal is that themes become evident, especially over the long term. If I hadn’t made a habit of remembering my dreams, I never would have noted how this woman became a kind of personal archetype of mine. It’s observations like this that make long term dream journaling very interesting.

If have you any experiences or thoughts on the archetypes we meet in our dreams, feel free to share it below.

Art by Claudio P

One of the earliest dreams I ever had was an experience that scared me because for the longest time I never realized it was a dream.

I reckon I was 4 or 5 years old at the time. Nearly 25 years later, I can still remember the man in this dream who threatened me. Here’s the dream retold from the perspective of my 29 year old:

I’m lying in bed, going to sleep. My bed rests up against the white walls of my bedroom, and as usual, I prefer to sleep towards the wall, as opposed to the other side where I may fall off in my sleep.

A man appears on the wall. He is made of a fuzzy, pasty material that outlines his body. He’s probably 6 inches tall, and his body is just an outline. Then he threatens me: he tells me in no uncertain terms that if I lay too close to the wall, he will poke my eye out!

Being 4 or 5 years old, my experience was taken quite literal: all I knew was that this man appeared in the wall and he told me that if I slept too close to the wall, he would poke my eye out. Of course I believed it would happen! It was terrifying and I yielded to his threat. For some time afterwards, I purposely slept with my body and face resting completely on the other side of the bed because of this man.

Wow, what a strange dream!

While this is not actually the earliest dream recollection that I have, it’s the most memorable. There are 2 other dreams I had (one with GI Joe, and one about the local pool) that I remember remembering as a very young child, and continued to recall my entire life. But they had no psychological impact on me, other than impounding on my psyche the weirdness of dreams. (I recall being astonished of having a simple dream of a GI Joe character turning his head twice at me. Why would I dream of such a thing, I wondered as a child. The “why” behind this question was astonishing to me.)

PS I’m smiling as I write this because here I am presenting one of my earliest recollections with dreams and I’m not so sure I’ve ever told anyone about it.

Addendum:

What’s the oldest dream you can remember from when you were a kid?

Did your dreams mean anything to you or have any impact on you as a child?

Do those childhood dreams have any meaning to you now?

untitled by photo extremist

My dreams have been choppy lately, and my dream journal is in desperate need of attention. The two are probably related.

I had a really weird nightmarish dream the other night – demon children chasing me, weird symbolism and whatnot. I am sure this is related to some real life struggles.

I see my work creeping into my dreams more and more lately. I don’t like it.

And deep discussions my wife and I have in waking life slip into my dreams, too, like the conversations are just carrying on with or without my intention. It’s slightly amusing to have these issues we’re working out continue to be discussed in a dream like we’re both still awake, talking about things. I think my mind is racing, and just can’t stop.

…

A few weeks ago I had a short lucid dream. I’ll credit it to laziness more than technique.

It was one of those mornings where I blissfully kept returning back to sleep, no matter how many times the alarm went off.

Then:

I’m dreaming, and I know it. I’ve got to prove it to myself!

I try to put my head through the wall – not violently or aggresively like a head bunt, just, casually, I guess you could say. It wouldn’t work. (Damn the laws of (dream) physics!)

So I stopped trying so hard, and like a hand submerged into water, my head goes into the wall. It felt tight and uncomfortable, and warm, too. Not very pleasant.

Then I’m awake again, turning off the alarm.

Again and again, I notice that stepping back and not trying so hard often gets the results I’m looking for in a lucid dream. This is true for flying and walking through walls and other things that fall under the “this isn’t supposed to be possible” category. Funny how there’s this intersection between intention and casual acceptance that leads to manifestation.

…

It’s always interesting to hear about the dreams of my family and friends.

My Mom sometimes tells me about her dreams – and now that I think about it, my Dad very often tells me about his dreams – occasionally with the request for an interpretation. Now, I’m not very into dream analysis for others, but I do like to hear what they think.

She’s had some really wild dreams lately about murder and giving birth. (Symbolic or what, eh?) Many months ago she had a “dream” – she doesn’t really consider it a dream per se – and, in her words, awoke to have the spirit of her mother lovingly and angelically floating above her, only to be whisped away like a mirage that disappears as soon as you look at it.

I listen curiously, and offer little opinions. I like that it comforts her. She feels it was her mother, watching over her.

…

Here’s a thought:

When you’ve grown up and lost both your parents to death, the closest you’ll ever get to them again is probably inside a dream.

Photo by Photo Extremist