“Dreams come in the service of health and wholeness.”
This quote was one of the mainstays of the late, great Rev. Jeremy Taylor, and still serves as an inspiration for most of us modern dream workers. We all dream whether we remember our dreams or pay attention to them. Every animal studied has dream-like interludes in their sleep including all mammals down to duck billed platypuses, as do cuttlefish and octopuses, and even spiders! This ubiquity of dreaming supports my own pragmatic and Darwinian view that dreams, like all persistent features of successful species, come in the service of survival aka health and wholeness.
Even though some people think that dreams are simply cerebral mis-firings with no meaning at all, recent studies have shown that dreams help us process events of the previous day, they integrate and sort memories, and they help us balance our emotions. They also seem to be rehearsals for the future, and they stimulate creativity!
There are many examples of this link between dreams and creativity including Robert Louis Stevenson who loved dreams and believed that “brownies” brought him ideas in dreams for novels such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Also, Paul McCartney, another dream enthusiast, dreamed that Mother Mary came to him in a dream and told him to “Let it be.” He got the tune of “Yesterday” in a dream, too, but not the words.
If you are interested in your dreams and would like to meet fellow dream enthusiasts, consider attending the Festival of Dreams, Santa Cruz at the Museum of Art and History on the weekend of October 10-12. This fourth annual event which began in 2017, but was not held during Covid, will be jam-packed with talks and hands-on workshops designed to help you learn to decode the intricacies of your own dream-life. The Festival includes a pop-up art show, a poetry reading, and live dream-inspired music. Our keynote will be Dr. Apela Colorado, founder of the Worldwide Indigenous Science Network. The Festival is crowned with a fantabulous Dream Ball on Saturday evening where you get to dance with your new tribe dressed as a meaningful dream character.
The Festival of Dreams is a regional conference sponsored by the International Association for the Study of Dreams. The IASD is an academic society founded in the Bay Area in 1983. Dream pioneers at the time include in addition to Jeremy Taylor, Patricia Garfield, Kathleen Sullivan, Gayle Delaney, Robert Van de Castle, Stephen La Berge and others. According to the mission statement, the IASD is designed “to promote an awareness and appreciation of dreams in both the professional and public arena … and to provide a forum for the eclectic and interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and information.”
Although the IASD sponsors rigorous academic research and has publications for scientific articles including the peer-reviewed journal Dreaming, what most people appreciate is personal dream sharing which is done in groups or one on one.
As an example of the meaningfulness that dreams can contain, I will tell you two of my dreams, both of which feature the symbol of a baton. No need to interpret that in a Freudian manner!
Dream: 10/5/24 I am traveling with others trying to get to some goal. I am driving the second of the two cars. At one point the other car is dead. I have a hot electrode to jump it, which is more like a wire or baton than a jumper cable. I touch it to the car’s battery and feel a mild shock in my body, especially my hand. Then I successfully start the car. I hear the engine chugging and then catching and turning over. I feel relief, satisfaction, and accomplishment.
While the dream didn’t at first strike me as important, we are all uniquely blind to the meanings of our own dreams, as Jeremy used to say, it was. Working with it in the safe space of my own dream group helped me to understand that the energy that restarted the second car came from me. That I have energy I am not usually aware of which I pass through the “baton” to the car. The process is mutual. The shock I felt in my body during the dream shows that even as I give energy, I also receive it from the Universe.
A few months later, I had a pair of identical dreams about another baton.
Dreams: 2/23/25 and 2/24/25: I see an object, possibly a baton, with two colors on its long axis, perhaps magenta and dark green. Somehow, I associate it with Christmas and try to convince others repeatedly of that, but they don’t understand or agree. I feel frustrated.
I had the same dream two nights in a row which makes me even more curious about its significance. Magenta is a color of optimism, passion, and enthusiasm. Forest green is a color of growth and renewal. This baton might also refer to the environmental crisis and its potential recovery. Christmas is the celebration of the birth and rebirth of the divine masculine.
Batons are used to clobber people, so the issue again seems to be about my own power. That I cannot convince others of my view in the dream reminds me of my feelings of helplessness around the devastating political polarization I witness in our society every day. So, what I get out of these two or three small fragments is that despite often feeling powerless, I do have the strength to fight for what I believe in and to fight the forces of reactionary thinking. Maybe we will even succeed.
Dream groups promote intimacy and build community. Dreams have the power to help us understand our authentic selves. They are profoundly spiritual: working them is my spiritual practice; they help us be in touch with humanity and the Universe; they entertain us with stories, and they help us understand where we are in history and how history might unfold.
There are many dream groups around the Bay area, and for anyone interested locally I recommend contacting Katherine Bell of Experiential Dream Work or Marsha Hudson and Norman Brown of the Love and Power Institute for Planetary Sustainability.
To me dreams are endlessly fascinating, and I look forward to learning more in October and to meeting others interested in dreams as I am. I hope to see you at the Festival of Dreams, Santa Cruz!
To learn more and register, go to FestivalofDreams-santacruz.eventbrite.com
