Freedom Dreaming
I think the revolution will be dreamed together.
What is a dream? Why do we dream?
I once took a course called Integral Approaches to Dreams, taught by a researcher whose work focused on dreams as autopoetic experiences designed to assist us in unfolding more and more dimensions of our multidimensional selves. Embedded in this approach is the assumption that dreams are an evolutionary tool, evidence of our inherent orientation toward the kind of internal growth that supports external action.
As a part of my coursework, I read multiple papers by Kelly Bulkeley, a psychologist who posits the theory that, when we dream, our imagination is at play.
We can think of play as any voluntary process that’s personally directed, allowing you to follow your own instincts as they come to you. Play involves creativity and choice within a given set of parameters. And the impulse to play is an innate and necessary biological process.
Children often develop games connected to the environment and circumstances in which they grow, the roles and rules to which they witness the adults around them adhere. Animals often play with each other by mimicking the motions of fighting. Both are examples of how play can be a space in which we learn and practice how to navigate our world.
For Bulkeley, dreams are the cognitive space in which our imagination does just this. In our dreams, according to this theory, we travel to scenarios related to our primary life concerns so we can engage in the creative process of practicing our responses in a safe environment.
Bulkeley’s work also explores the political dimension of dreams. He’s analyzed dreams related to presidential elections, Covid, and the uprisings of summer 2020 to understand how dreams are both deeply personal and profoundly impacted by our relationship to seismic political shifts. Through his research, Bulkeley names the dreaming connection between the “I” and the “We.” While our dreams are expressions of our interiority, they’re also social processes. Our social location impacts how our collective lived experiences show up (or not) in our dreams.
We do ourselves a disservice when we attempt to decouple our politics from our dreamscape. In an individualistic culture, it makes sense that we would be primed to think of dreams only as a space for self-awareness as it relates to our own mental and emotional growth. But our dreams are also a space for the unfolding of our interconnected social and political awakenings.
When we remember this, we can commit to the process of decolonizing our dreams.
Writer and scholar Anthony Shafton recognized that the field of dream research - even within more contemporary, integral approaches - was decidedly white. In response, he interviewed 116 Black Americans about their dreams for his book Dream Singers: The African American Way with Dreams. Shafton describes how Black dreams continue to be shaped by our cultural retention of African ways of knowing. Key themes that emerge in his research include ancestor dreams; predictive dreams; an “openness to dream-like experiences” in waking life; and an overall veneration for dreams as sites of spiritual wisdom and power.
An intersubjectivity that takes into account a connection with the ancestral realm acknowledges that, in our dreams, things might surface related to memories that are not just personal, not just collective, but also ancestral. Africana worldviews consider there to be what Wade Nobles, Lesiba Baloyi, and Tholene Sodi describe in their article “Pan African Humanness and Sakhu Djaer as Praxis for Indigenous Knowledge Systems” as three interrelated realms of existence: the microcosmos, which is our immediately perceptible, material world; the mesocosmos, which is the intermediate world of spirits and energetic forces; and the macrocosmos, which is the plane of the Divine and the ancestors that exists beyond our physical senses. In this cosmology, there is “a constant, perpetual, perceivable, and continuous relationship” between all beings in all three cosmos. The meso and macrocosmos are no less real, no less a part of our reality, than the microcosmos. This necessarily assumes, then, that micro, meso, and macro must be taken into consideration in any process of knowing, any study, any effort at making meaning.
As a person of African descent who is committed to recovering and honoring my own Africana episteme, I view my dreams through the lens of this continuous relationship between and among realms.
Who am I in my dreams? Am I me? My mother? My great-great grandmother? You? Us?
With whom do I interact in my dreams? Myself? People I know in my waking life?Plants and animals? Fire and Water? Deities? Ancestors? Spirit Guides? Spirit itself?
Where am I in my dreams? In the past? Present? Future? In a space beyond all three?
Time, as I understand it, is not linear. It might not even be real. Everything is happening now. But our experience on Earth is shaped by a shared illusion that time moves in a straight line. When we remember that this construct is just that - a construct - we also remember that the version of us that we’re becoming already exists. We’re just living the experience of syncing up with them.
Shafton also writes about the prevalence of déjà vu moments in the dreams of his Black interview subjects. I think déjà vu occurs as a flash of remembrance of the truth of our timelessness, of our multi-cosmic existence in the eternal now. A moment when all of our selves on all of the timelines who have already lived all of this meet up in a flash to say, ah, that’s right. I remember. This whole time thing doesn’t really mean what I think it does.
We talk often about how we have to become the people who will create the new and loving reality that we desire, in the aftermath of the fall of this current one.
I think it’s less about becoming, and more about remembering.
The trinity of past, present and future sits in relation to and interconnection with the trinity of the micro, meso, and macrocosmos.
“The African process of knowing and comprehension,” Nobles et al write, “may be better understood as the interplay of radiations, vibrations, fields, planes, waves and points of energy between and amongst the realms of reality.”
What does all of this mean when it comes to dreams?
For me, it means that dreams are a process in which our imagination is at energetic interplay.
A dream is a form of technology that we can access and utilize with deeper individual and collective impact when we relate to it as a site of personal, social, and spiritual remembrance of ourselves as energy. Energy that exists outside of and across dimensions of time, outside of and across the knowable cosmos. Energy that can go anywhere, do anything, know everything, in an instant. Energy that chose to incarnate in these bodies at this moment in “time” because we are the ones who wanted to come to Earth to have the experience of forgetting, and then remembering, the truth of the Energy that we are.
Maybe our dreams are the place where we remember that our souls came here to Earth as their own form of play.
Maybe the primary circumstances of our lives on Earth are the voluntary, creative processes of our souls practicing relational scenarios within a given set of parameters.
Maybe our lives are the dreamscape of our souls.
Do you tend to keep your dreams to yourself? Do you, perhaps, share them every now and then with a co-habitating partner? Do you sometimes tell them to a relative or friend? Do you bring up particularly charged dreams with a therapist?
What if dreaming could be a group practice?
There are people and places in the world that remember when our sleep was more communal, because our living arrangements were more communal. When we lived more necessarily relational lives. When our feeling safe enough to sleep was not connected to being in an enclosed, isolated space, but rather to belonging with and being cared for by others.
In communal living, we might practice more communal dreaming. Our dreams can then become a part of our relational attunement, of our collective understanding of the energetic currents shaping our shared, multi-dimensional existence.
Dream sharing and discussion can illuminate common themes and shifts, creating a web that connects us to a relational sense of place and purpose as material and spiritual beings. This way of dreaming together can support us in understanding our dreams beyond individual significance. It can reconnect us with the shared symbols that arise from shared cosmologies. It can deepen our capacity to “read” the meaning of a dream with an inherent orientation toward micro-meso-macro cosmic interrelationship.
Our spiritual power is much stronger when we’re cultivating it together.
When we live alone, we dream alone. Our dream interpretation remains in the realm of the individual. And perhaps the content of our dreams, itself, shifts away from a codex of multi-cosmic, archetypal symbology toward a site of the solely microcosmic and the solely (seemingly) personal.
The game is more fun when we play together. Our dreams are more potent when we dream together.
I’m trying to be more intentional about my dreaming. Taking time before I fall asleep to center myself, breathe, and ask my benevolent ancestors, spirit guides, and guardian angels to accompany me as I journey through my dream landscape.
I saw someone on the internet say that our dreams are like custom designed psychedelic trips, co-created by our subconscious and Spirit to lead us to sites of healing that hold both individual meaning and collective resonance. Just as it is with the use of entheogens and psychedelics, the journeys and destinations of our dream travel are shaped by environment and intention.
When we decide before we fall asleep that we intend to receive wisdom and understanding to support us in our waking lives, it happens. Even the most seemingly mundane dream moments can contain vital information.
An example.
This past Sunday evening, I felt heavy. Weary. Grief-laden.
I had a dream that night that I was in line at a small cafeteria, standing in front of a robust selection of teas. Not just the usual green, black, and earl grey that serve as consolation for the non-coffee drinkers at the work function. There were all kinds of herbal teas that one would typically only find in speciality shops.
And one tea called out to me: mullein.
Other things happened in the dream that I don’t remember. But upon waking, the thing that stuck with me was this particular plant reaching for me, asking for my attention.
In the morning, I went to my herb cupboard and discovered, buried deep beyond my first visual scan, a container of mullein that I’d purchased months ago when I was dealing with a nasty respiratory virus. Mullein, I knew, supports the health of the lungs. I had some of it then, when I was sick, and I promptly forgot about it once I was well.
I never would have thought to reach for mullein in the absence of illness. But I decided to listen to my dreams and have a cup.
Over the course of the day, I noticed that my heart space, which had felt so heavy, was lighter. Clearer.
I chose to start my morning with mullein again the following day. Lighter and clearer still.
That evening, I happened upon a YouTube video in which a seer and herbalist gave a collective reading of our current energy. In it, she mentioned that many of us are now feeling the weight of multiple layers of grief related to our experiences of - and participation in - the hierarchical, abusive templates of the old, false reality that is now crumbling. Layers of grief from not just our own lives, but from multiple lifetimes, from patterns passed down from our lineages.
She mentioned the tea she was drinking as she recorded, a custom blend of herbs that support the energetic clearance of deep, ancestral grief from our hearts. And she recommended that we might all benefit from working with these herbs right now, especially if we’re feeling this heaviness.
The first herb that she named as a deep grief clearer? You guessed it. Mullein.
I laughed out loud at the timing and specificity of it all. I remembered that this is play, and delighted in a moment of co-recognition of another human playing alongside me.
Spirit made sure to confirm what I’d already received from my dreams, what I’d already intuitively followed, what I’d already felt in my body, through this message from someone else. Someone I’ve never met who shared her wisdom in a way that helped me deepen my trust in my own.
If we’re open to dreaming in this way, we may discover that we’re not as alone as we think. That what feels individual is much more collective than we’ve been conditioned to believe.
I have a message for you. An interpretation of another recent dream of mine that feels too important not to offer.
In this dream, I was part of a group of neighbors organizing to improve the conditions at a local hospital. As we moved through the hospital building together in preparation for our direct action, we sang. A spontaneous and joyful song that erupted from the group. No one could tell who started it. It just emerged as a celebration of our love for each other, the love that fueled us to care for our community in this way.
Side note: Ah, I wish I could remember the lyrics! I receive sooo many songs in my dreams that I can never remember upon waking, and it frustrates me!
As we reached the site of our planned action, we discovered that a VERY famous liberal politician who shall remain nameless (but who has a pattern of being used to quell any true spark of revolution that erupts among the people) was standing on a stage, flanked by cameras. And as we approached, we heard that he was singing OUR song.
People in the group got so excited that this famous man knew us. Knew our song. They felt honored and special. They received it as evidence that we were creating real change. They silenced themselves and sat down to gaze up at him. To listen to his singular voice.
As I noticed this happening, I felt tension rising in my body. And I held the question: will I be the one to interrupt this, or will I go along with the group?
That’s when, of course, I woke up. Right at that big decision point. As I often do.
In my half-awake/half-asleep state, I wrote this note to myself. And to you. A message for all of the artists, organizers, educators, care workers, healers, spiritualists. For those who enact love in the world beyond these labels. For everyone who is channeling love as their primary mode of orientation, who chooses to trust and be moved by the love that is rising in us all.
This is a time that calls for us to facilitate and make space for what love is attempting to do through us. People will respond to this, will be energized and inspired and dedicated to this mode of collective leadership, as we move through the great change. And as we begin to make visible and undeniable change, those holding onto the old template of power hoarding will seek ways to co-opt our authentic song. We’ll hear it sung from the mouths of those who have been the primary architects of the old, false paradigm.
They don’t always try to neutralize you through brute force. Often it’s through the seduction of celebrity. They will deploy celebrity to placate you, to make you think you’ve won because you’ve gotten the attention of the shiny ones. And if you’re not in alignment with love, you’ll accept this as the change, as the victory, and end up far removed from your original goal.
Don’t be surprised when they see and mimic your authentic message. Don’t fall for their tactic of making you think you’re really shifting things because they’re noticing and mimicking you. That’s not the point. And you are the kind of catalyst for whom this can easily happen. Just as easily as some will be violently disappeared for their efforts, you can be seduced into disappearing yourself.
We need each other to remind each other of our authentic goal, of our true motivation. Our greatest collective good doesn’t lie in someone with fame, someone we’ve been coerced into pedestalizing, stealing our song and using it to lull the masses into submission.
When this happens, stay grounded. Stay in connection to your center. Once that song is in their mouths, it’s no longer accomplishing our original intention. It’s now being used to hypnotize us into accepting the status quo that we know is already, necessarily, crumbling. Don’t be hypnotized by the sound of our song in their mouths.
Return your gaze to the center, to your people, to love.
Don’t be afraid to be the person who tells the truth about this, who disrupts the attempt at mass hypnosis, who reminds others that the person they’ve deployed to quell our radical remembrance of our collective truth is not on our side. If they were, they wouldn’t be up on a stage singing our song. They would perhaps be meeting you where you are, eye to eye, in the process of facilitating change, and demonstrating their willingness to break ranks with the old by listening to and learning from you. Without a camera in sight.
I hope this message resonates for you as an affirmation of your necessary role in our collective awakening.
Would you be open to dreaming with me?
Do you want to receive more messages like this, from my dreams?
Are you down to share the wisdom that you’re receiving, the themes that are emerging, in your dreams?
If I were to start a virtual dream sharing circle, would you meet me there?
Let me know. Because I think our remembrance of this technology might be one of our most revolutionary cheat codes in this game.