E.l.e.c.t.r.i.c D.r.e.a.m.s Subscribe: electric-dreams-subscribe@yahoogroups.com Unsubscribe: electric-dreams-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com Subscribe Online: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/electric-dreams o|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|o E.l.e.c.t.r.i.c D.r.e.a.m.s Volume #11 Issue #7 July 2004 ISSN# 1089 4284 o|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|o http://www.dreamgate.com/electric-dreams o|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|o Download a cover for this issue: http://tinyurl.com/yqfy4 o|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|o C O N T E N T S ++ Editor's Notes ++ News – PsiberDreaming Conference The Association for the Study of Dreams September 19, 2004 - October 3, 2004 Virtual Conference - Online ++ Review: IASD Dream Conference 2004 Strephon Kaplan-Williams ++ Column: An Excerpt From the Lucid Dream Exchange Lucy Gillis Robert Waggoner interviews Beverly D'Urso ++ Article: Evolution of the Dream (From "How To Fly") Linda Lane Magallón ++ Column: Lucid Living On The World Dreams Peace Bridge The World Dreams Peace Bridge A View from the Bridge Jean Campbell ++ Column: Spectral Waves: The Quest for the Holy Grail Spectral Moon, White Spectral Wizard Year Ron Adams 2004 ++ DREAM SECTION: Dreams from June, 2004 Host Kat Peters-Midland XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX D E A D L I N E : July 21st deadline for August 2004 submissions XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Post Dreams and Comments on Dreams to: http://www.dreamgate.com/dream/temple Send Dreaming News and Calendar Events to: Peggy Coats Send Articles and Subscription concerns to: Richard Wilkerson: o|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|o Editor's Notes o|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|o Welcome to the July 2004 issue of Electric Dreams, your portal to dreams and dreamwork online. If you are new to dreams and dreamwork, please join us on dreamchatters@yahoogroups.com and we will guide you to the resources & groups you need. To join send an e to dreamchatters-subscribe@yahoogroups.com Announcing two new staff members to Electric Dreams. Kat Peters- Midland has volunteered to take over the Dream Section. Kat is a therapist, dream worker. You may know her as the editor and publisher of the Rocky Mountain Dream Journal. If not, be sure to stop by the RMDJ site and get a subscription at: http://www.rmdjournal.com/ Janet Garrett joins Electric Dreams as an archive specialist and is currently transferring all the past Electric Dreams articles to formatting for the web. Be sure to see her work in progress at http://www.improverse.com/ed-articles/index.htm Electric Dreams is looking for a Dream News Editor. If you are interested in this position, see the details below. This is a really fun position as you get to know all the players in the field of dreams. This month in Electric Dreams: Strephon Kaplan-Williams reports on the 21st International Conference of the Association for the Study of Dreams. Strephon's life marks a balance between someone who has spent decades studying Jungian therapy, and yet has also gone beyond the Jungian fold and deeply influenced the Dreamwork movement. Whether you were there or missed this year's conference you will want to read this review. Lucy Gillis shares travels around the dream world to find the most talented and experimental lucid dreamers. This month, "DreamSpeak: An Interview with a Lucid Dreamer." In this three part series, Robert Waggoner interviews long time lucid dreamer Beverly D'Urso. Linda Magallón. author of Mutual Dreaming, offers us a selection this month from her book on How to Fly. In the article, "Evolution of the Dream," Magallón offers some theories on flight in dreams that delve into the way evolution has expressed itself in our hopes, fears, desires and dreams. Jean Campbell honors members of The World Dreams Peace Bridge in "Lucid Living On The World Dreams Peace Bridge." If you have never heard of the Peace Bridge or if you are an active member, be sure to read her column "A View from the Bridge." The Waves is a newsletter reporting on the explorations underway at the Sea Life forum. They take a community approach to dreaming, running monthly dreaming projects to learn more about the world, and the evolutionary path before ourselves and our planet. This month from Ron Adams, "The Quest for the Holy Grail" Keep in mind that the Fall PsiberDreaming Conference is almost upon us. For more information, read the invitation from the Host, Ed Kellogg, Ph.D. Talking with dead people, flying spirits, flashing Virgin Mary eyes, dying whale in a bathtub, and dating a serial killer…What do they have in common? They are in the Electric Dreams Dream Section. Be sure to read all of these dreams and more. If you want to contribute dreams, enter them at http://www.dreamgate.com/dream/temple or join the dream flow at dreamflow@yahoogroups.com (dreamflow-subscribe@yahoogroups.com) -------------------- For those of you who are new to dreams and dreaming, be sure to stop by one of the many resources: http://www.dreamtree.com http://www.dreamgate.com/electric-dreams http://www.dreamgate.com/dream/library Electric Dreams in PDF: (thanks to Nick Cumbo) http://www.dreamofpeace.net/community/electricdreams/ -------------------- Dreamin' up a storm, -Richard Wilkerson /////////////////////////////////////////////////////// o|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|o Global Dreaming News seeks new Editor – (volunteer position) If you feel you would be a good candidate to report the news that is going on in the dream world, be sure to contact Richard Wilkerson at rcwilk@dreamgte.com The GDNews editor will receive the support of the Electric Dreams staff in making contact with all the essential people in the dream world, and will be responsible for putting this information together once a month for publication. This is a really fun position and you can expand then news as you like. In the past, we have included reviews of dream books, dates for conferences, seminars, talks and other events, new websites and research news and requests. o|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|o IASD Dream Conference 2004 ©2004 Strephon Kaplan-Williams o|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|o [IASD is the International Association for the Study of Dreams] Whether you have gone to an ASD-IASD Dream Conference or not recently, you may wonder what it is like. Is the yearly conference like it is described in the brochure? What actually happens there? What is in it for you if you choose to go next year to Conference 2005 to be held in Berkeley, California, USA? Don't miss it, is all I can say. An ASD conference is equivalent to being at the finals of a tennis grand slam tournament, The Rose Bowl, The World Cup Finals, listening to the Dalai Lama, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. No, we would not go that far on the last one, but it is always a tremendous experience for those who let themselves fully participate. Why? Do you want to live at the leading edge of culture and consciousness in life? Then the dream and the dreamwork movement is one of those segments of the cultural edge in modern life, though wars and political issues get the limelight in the regular media. At the annual ASD conference you will meet each other and chances are you will find many truly dedicated people to interact with and learn from and be inspired by. Is it not important to lead a dedicated life? Let me give some personal examples from this last conference which I attended with my assistant and workshop presenter, Daniela Seebe from Germany. I also was a Featured Presenter with around sixty people in attendance and a workshop presenter with maybe twenty by the time the people all came in. Maybe there were around two hundred and fifty in all at the conference. I do not know the exact number. Imagine that all these, presenters and participants alike, have been drawn here to Copenhagen for four days to engage in dream rituals like tribes of old thousands of years ago because of their dreams and wanting to know the meaning of their dreams and their lives. One presenter from Finland, Annti Revonsuo, as a scientist presents his research with slides to support his thesis that threat in dreams is basic and goes back thousands and thousands of years in our evolutionary history in which our ancestors had to dream of real threats in the night from animals and natural phenomenon such as forest fire and earthquakes, dreaming these things but also trying to understand them in a way to survive them and keep their families alive and together. It's a wonderful theory, and he is setting out to prove it by inference through content analysis studies. I for one accept the possibility but offer a different thought in my conversation with him and in my presentation, The Dream and Its Dreamwork, available as a CD from me or ASD. My contribution is that through analysis of the dream ego, the dreamer in the dream, you can measure through a series of dreams what the dream ego is for the dreamer and any significant changes in dreams and life. No one has focused on this so far. Content Analysis does not focus on the dream ego as the most significant and common symbol occurring through a series of dreams. I am now developing The Dream Ego Assessment Profile and using it with my students since two years ago. So is not threat only one of the key factors in dreams? See Patricia Garfield's latest book on key dream themes, The Universal Dream Key. This is an example of major thinking around dreams currently happening. Come, load your mind with good stuff to ruminate during the coming years. Key thoughts help determine how we think about and live our lives. What are the major dream themes as I see them in using the technique I am most known for, Following The Dream Ego? I have twenty in The Dream Ego Assessment Profile which you can send for as a download to use, or get at my website when it is soon available at www.dreamwork2000.com. To name a few: Active-Passive, Fearful-Fight, Choosing, Congruent. There are twenty in all, twenty major dynamics with which to evaluate your behavior in your dreams and apply the insights to your life. Is Threat not also true for modern times despite governments and technologies that are supposed to protect us? During the cold war in the Seventies and Eighties I remember well how so many people, including myself, had dreams of atomic bombs exploding. When a threat is made visible we can better deal with it. Anxiety is fear without an object. When we find the objects and experiences we are afraid of we can the better deal with them. There are of course many lessons from working with dreams. During my presentation on a new tool of mine, The Dream Alphabet, a precocious eight year old sitting in her father's lap shared her dream and the reasons from school for having it, all in a very adult like manner. In the end I asked her, "Are you telling it like it is, or are you complaining?" She thought a few seconds and then said clearly, "Telling it like it is." Some adults smiled in appreciation that the newest generation was already working with dreams. Her father, Fred Jeremy Seligson, was an American living in Korea with a Korean wife and teaching at a university there. This precocious eight-year old girl bridged continents and cultures in her genetic and destiny heritage. Her father uses the Dream Cards in Korea as part of his work. I never got to his presentation but I taught him and his daughter some spiritual aikido during the intermissions. He uses the Dream Cards, he said. A number of others came up to tell me they were using the Dream Cards regularly. One was Lauren Schneider, a psychotherapist and "dream tender" from Southern California. I wish I could have met them all. But maybe next conference year all of us who use and love the Dream Cards will get together to share. Maybe we will have a Dream Cards Day during or after. Anything is possible where dreams are concerned. Such tools unite us all. When I wrote and published the first comprehensive dreamwork manual in 1980 it was the first. Now in the book store there were at least ten different dreamwork manuals of good quality and a range of around thirty authors who have recently written about gaining meaning from your dreams. Near the end of my presentation I invited any presenters present to stand up and just tell the audience briefly what they were offering at the conference so people could know them. Twenty presenters stood up. A side effect of this was that we all grew to appreciate the dedication to dreams and dreamwork that the other presenters had. The dreamwork movement has surely grown tremendously since incorporated in ASD in 1984. When you go to a conference you can also become a part of a dream and dreamwork family, those regulars, presenters and participants alike who attend most conferences through the years. You appreciate the caring and warmth that people show each other. You appreciate that many of the regulars have not only maintained the organization but have also developed a dreamwork interest which they present. I was interested to learn that the outgoing president, Bob Hoss, was trained also as a Gestalt therapist and has written an excellent dream course manual which he does giving basic dreamwork techniques, including working with color in dreams. Many people were doing courses for people in the helping professions. Alan Siegel, Dr Dream, teaches other therapists, not only in America, but if I got it right, also in China. Robbie Bosnak has a dream group in Japan, and Daniela Seebe and I met two of his Japanese students at the reception given by the mayor and city council of Copenhagen for us. Imagine being treated as royalty at a centuries old town hall by the president of the Copenhagen City Council because we were all active dreamers in sleep and in waking life. A further short talk with Robbie Bosnak led to the interesting theory that dream and the psyche are in a fluid state. Thus rather than dream figures being fixed parts of ourselves like sub- personalities these figures are more fluid dynamic entities and functions happening now. Bosnak himself keeps his own personality identity fluid by constant travel to many countries and cultures to do his special forms of dream groups. There is an incredible amount and kind of dreamworking the dream going on now. When you join ASD you link yourself into an endless chain of dreamworking possibilities, some dreamwork psychology, some educational, some creative. Fariba Bogzaran is a trained psychologist but seems to emphasize more the creative ways of re-experiencing dreams. Jeremy Taylor is the Johnny Appleseed of the American dreamwork movement because of his constant traveling around for years giving presentations on the value of dreams and dreamwork. I did not get to attend many of the presentations. Patricia Garfield asked if I had attended her presentation on the dreams of Hans Christian Andersen. Alas, I had not because as a presenter myself I had many contacts to make and people to relate to and that morning I had not the extra energy. But I bought her book and had a special lunch with her, just the two of us as long-time friends and cofounders from the past until the present. She informed me we are almost the same age. I experienced from her her deep feminine wisdom, a "golden moment" for me at the conference. My conversations and interviews with psychologists pointed again to the need for psychotherapists and psychologists to be trained in dreamworking the dream. They get precious little of this in their regular training. And so my idea of declaring a separate branch of dreamwork psychology seems to be gaining steam. We have a name for it, starting this year, and it is called, IDPA, the International Dream and Dreamwork Association. This is just a little slice of life. When you go as a participant or presenter you feel the bonding with all those who take their dreams seriously. You find inspiration and community in meeting others in such a friendly and stimulating atmosphere. You learn many new key ideas around dreaming and working with dreams. Bob Hoss asked Jeremy Taylor and I to give brief remarks to the question, how are we doing as an organization twenty-one years down the road from the founding of ASD? Patricia Garfield was unable to be there at the membership meeting. Jeremy and I embraced each other. We have stayed dedicated to educating the public to dreams and dreamwork, along with Patricia Garfield with her many books connecting dreams and life. What I could say most is that the dream itself is the treasure at the end of the rainbow, and the rainbow itself is the many approaches to working with dreams. As Fariba Bogzaran asked of a presenter. Why do you emphasize only one method? Are you open to learning about and using many methods and approaches for working with the dream? This I would say to all of us. Keep the dream as the focus but learn and use many methods and approaches so that you may reap the incredible harvest of working with your dreams to inspire your life and the lives of others. Perhaps if you see yourself as a Dream and Dreamwork Educator you use only one method for working with people's dreams. But if you are a Dream and Dreamwork Psychologist or Practitioner you will of necessity use many methods to help your people reexperience and live from their dreams. How has ASD done, to repeat Bob Hoss' question? It is wonderful to meet all the dedicated presenters on dreamwork and dreaming. The ASD has succeeded in being at the forefront of re-creating a now world-wide dream culture. While there are not millions of us yet with the dream as a purposeful focus for our lives, at least there are many thousands who read the books, go to trainings and workshops, and work with their dreams. As Jeremy Taylor said, there are many courses now in colleges and universities on the dream and its dreamwork. Dreams are here to stay. A new artifact of culture has rooted in the soil of the future happening now. As came to me years ago, We dream to wake to life. We also live the dream to inspire our lives. I can seen the conference in California next year being the biggest of all yet, maybe seven hundred people. Why not start now preparing to attend and present? Remember that the IASD yearly conferences are dream culture in themselves. You will be inspired. You will dream special dreams, as I did, with C.G. Jung speaking to a group of us dreamed by me on the first night of the conference. They have a contest every conference on dream telepathy. Why not also have at least a reporting of the "great dreams" that come in from the holotropic universe because of the conference? "I have a dream!" says the prophet. "And we have the dreamworking techniques for working with that dream!" say all the presenters who make the conferences a living experience of dreams waking to life. Join the family. Meet each other. Meet the participants and presenters. Help out in any way you can. ASD is a small army of volunteers. Without their dedication we would have much less dream culture in our lives. I say join us and have your own amazing experiences. And, oh, also pace yourself. It makes you very high and much energy goes around at these conferences. Be prepared for a few days rest after to assimilate all that has happened for you. This may be one of the highlights of your year. Strephon Kaplan-Williams Strephon Kaplan-Williams We dream to wake to life! Visit http://www.dreamwork2000.com o|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|o PsiberDreaming Conference The Association for the Study of Dreams September 19, 2004 - October 3, 2004 Virtual Conference - Online Invitation from Host, Ed Kellogg, Ph.D. E-mail: alef1@msn.com o|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|o http://www.asdreams.org/psi2004/ Join some of the world's foremost experts on the subject of psi- dreaming for two weeks of cutting-edge papers, discussions, workshops, contests, and chats at a bargain price. If you've ever had a precognitive dream, a lucid dream, or simply an 'unusual dream' that puzzled you, this online conference seems the place for you. Past presenters include: Charles T. Tart, Ph.D., author of Altered States of Consciousness, Robert L. Van de Castle, Ph.D. author of Our Dreaming Mind, Rosemary Ellen Guiley, Ph.D. author of The Dreamer's Way, Robert Moss, author of Dreamgates, Marcia Emery, Ph.D., author of The Intuitive Healer, Alan Siegel, Ph.D., author of Dream Wisdom, Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D. author of Lucid Dreaming, Dale E. Graff, author of Tracks in the Psychic Wilderness, Stanley Krippner, Ph.D. co-author of Extraordinary Dreams, Jeffrey Mishlove, Ph.D., host of Thinking Allowed - and many others! Previous conferences brought in rave reviews: "Bravo!", "Incredible!", "a wonderful experience," "amazing!", "topnotch", "I am really thrilled," "great conference," "please, please do this frequently," "I don't know how many accolades I can give you, too many to count, I believe. The conference was simply great!! Good presenters, topics, participants, and great energy." If you missed the first two, make sure you attend the third! Features: 1. Online Presentations, including provocative papers and workshops on popular and cutting edge topics, such as: remote viewing, precognition, dream telepathy, mutual dreaming, psychopompic dreams, lucid dreaming, visionary dreaming, prodromal dreams, dream healing, the nature of dream reality, and dreaming as a spiritual practice. Workshops will provide resource lists for those who wish to explore topics in greater depth, and practical instructions for techniques or experiments detailed enough so that conference participants can try them out at home. 2. Dedicated PsiberDreaming Discussion Boards where participants can discuss each paper and workshop in depth with authors and other participants, and can post specific questions, etc. Links to relevant threads would appear conveniently at the end of each posted presentation, updated daily to show new threads of interest. 3. Scheduled Chats each week of the conference with presenters and/or other experts on cutting edge topics. 4. Numerous PsiberDreaming Events where participants can test their skills and explore different facets of paranormal dreaming, including dream telepathy and remote viewing, precognition, and mutual dreaming. Judges will evaluate how well dreamers tune into the designated targets, or how well dreamers perform a specific dream task. And ASD will provide prizes to the winners! 5. A PsiberDreaming Gallery of Dreams and Art. One section of this gallery will feature the "best of the best", graphic images of dream art selected from the submissions to past ASD conferences, formatted into a sequential point and click cyber tour. A second section of the gallery will provide a place where participants can display their own dream art (with accompanying dream text or dream poetry), sharing them with other participants. Event Dates and Costs: The PsiberDreaming Conference runs from September 21, through October 5, 2003. Online Participation Costs for both weeks (no one week rate): General Public $38! (US Dollars) ASD Members $33! (US Dollars) Students with valid ID $23! (no additional ASD discount) Note: we've deliberately set the price of attending this conference low to open this conference to interested participants worldwide. Please take advantage! http://www.asdreams.org/psi2004/ ------------------------ END NEWS ---------------------- o|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|o An Excerpt From The Lucid Dream Exchange By Lucy Gillis o|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|o LDE is pleased to present DreamSpeak: An Interview with a Lucid Dreamer. In this three part series, Robert Waggoner interviews long time lucid dreamer Beverly D'Urso. (Please note, as with all material in LDE, the author retains copyright of his or her material. In this interview, the questions are by Robert Waggoner and the responses are copyright of Beverly D'Urso.) DREAMSPEAK AN INTERVIEW WITH BEVERLY D'URSO: A LUCID DREAMER - PART ONE (c) Beverly D'Urso Questions by Robert Waggoner Beverly D'Urso (formerly Beverly Kedzierski, and also Bev Heart) is an incredible lucid dreamer. She served as Stephen LaBerge's main lucid dream research subject in the early years of his research work, and helped provide key insights into lucid dreaming. Interviewed by magazines, national and local television, and other media, Beverly has promoted a greater understanding of lucid dreaming and "lucid living." The LDE is pleased to provide a multi-issue interview of this fascinating lucid dreamer. ROBERT: Beverly, thanks for doing an interview with the LDE. Since you play a pivotal part in the development of lucid dreaming, tell us how your interest in dreaming began. BEVERLY: I grew up in a small suburb of Chicago, the only child of a lower- middle class family. I was very close to my parents. When I was about five years old, my grandfather came to live with us. It was around this time that I remember having a series of recurring nightmares. I imagined gruesome witches living in the back of my dark and scary closet. In my dreams, I'd be quietly playing or lying in bed. Without notice, the witches would sneak out and come after me. I'd scream and run through the house, making it to the back porch and sometimes down the back stairs, but never any further. I'd fall on the cement at the bottom of the stairs, spread eagle on my back, and just as they were about to devour me, I'd wake up. In an icy sweat, breathing fast, I'd be terrified of going to sleep again. For a few weeks, the witches would leave me alone, but, when I least expected it, they'd be back. After years of this same recurring dream, I'd find myself pleading, as I lie on the cement with the witches hovering over me, "Please, spare me tonight. You can have me in tomorrow's night's dream!" At that point, they'd stop their attack and I'd wake up. However, the dream was still very upsetting, and I always hated going to sleep. I would lie in bed and tell myself that the witches only came in my dreams, while I was safe in bed. I tried to get myself to remember this the next time they appeared. ROBERT: So, recurring nightmares led you to realize that witches only came in dreams. When did you consciously realize this in the dream state and become lucid? BEVERLY: One hot, sticky summer night, when I was seven, I was especially afraid of going to sleep. I was sure the witches would appear in my dreams that night. My mom was sleeping on the living room couch, which she often did when it was so hot. The front door was opened to create a breeze. So, still being awake about two in the morning, I grabbed an old, dark pink, American Indian blanket. I put the blanket on the floor next to the couch to be close to my mom, and I fell asleep. Soon, I found myself back in my bedroom, unknowingly in a dream, and noticed the closet door creaking open. I knew at once it was the witches, and I began to run for my life. I barely made it through the kitchen. As I raced across the porch and down the stairs, I tripped as usual and immediately those horrifying witches caught up to me. The instant before I started to plead with them, the thought flashed through my mind, "If I ask them to take me in tomorrow night's dream, then this must be a dream!" Instantly, my fear dissolved. I looked the witches straight in the eye and said, "What do you want?" They gave me a disgusting look, but I knew I was safe in a dream, and I continued, "Take me now. Let's get this over with!" I watched with amazement, as they quickly disappeared into the night. I woke up on the floor next to my mom feeling elated. I knew they were gone. I never had the witch nightmare in this form again! I would later have new episodes with the witches in my dreams and discover similar witch scenarios in my waking life. ROBERT: Did that initial lucid dream realization change your outlook on dreaming? How so? BEVERLY: My dreams were really fun after that night. Remembering the feeling of facing the witches, I learned to recognize when I was asleep and dreaming. Safe in the dream, I would do things I'd never do when awake! Being a very obedient student during the daytime, I would dream of being in class jumping wildly and carefree all over the tops of the school desks. Whatever I desired, was possible. Whatever I thought, would occur. I felt ecstatic. I could face other fears, heal or nurture myself emotionally, resolve conflicts or blocks, have adventures, help others, or just have fun. I could fly, visit places, people, or time periods, and generally "do the impossible!" I made up ways to wake myself up from dreams, such as staring at bright streetlights in the dream, whenever I wanted to end a dream. Oftentimes, I would lay in bed imagining myself doing backward summersaults and float right into my dream, without ever losing consciousness, as I fell asleep. I figured out how to stay in a dream, if I felt I was waking up, how to change the dream scene, and even how to repeat the same dream! ROBERT: What other things did you learn to do in your early lucid dreaming? BEVERLY: I learned to fly in my dreams, as well. Usually, I would be lucid. I started out flying like a little bird, having to flap my wings to stay up. This could take much effort. As I grew up, I discovered that I could fly like superman, soaring effortlessly through the air, arms first. At some point, I must have hit some telephone wires or some other barrier because I fell. I soon realized that because it was my dream, I could fly right through physical objects of any kind. I had fun flying through walls and even deep into the earth. As I matured in my lucid dreaming skills, I could eliminate flying by merely imagining that where I wanted to go was right behind me. This soon got boring, and I went back to flying for the simple pleasure it brought me. However, lately, I have been doing what I call "surrender flying.'" I lean back, and I let an invisible force pull me upwards from my heart area. This is a very ecstatic sensation, and it often leads me to places of great peace and power, which remain with me even after I wake up. ROBERT: My earliest lucid awareness came when I was 10 or 11 years old, and saw dinosaurs in the public library in my dream and announced that this must be a dream. Besides the witches, what else helped you realize that you were dreaming? BEVERLY: Often, in dreams, I would often find myself in front of my childhood home. At times, there were changes to the structure of the house. Other times the house changed in impossible ways. Sometimes, people other than my parents were living there. In the dream, I'd often get confused and scared. However, the more I thought about it while awake, the more I realized that I only saw the house this way when I was in a dream. So, I told myself, the next time I'm in front of my childhood home, I will check for these changes. If I see them, I will know that I am dreaming. From then on, seeing my childhood home was often a clue for me to become lucid in my dreams. Once I became lucid in this manner, I could pursue any other goals that I might have for that night. ROBERT: What I find amazing is that you were so young. Did your lucid dreaming make you feel unusual, or did you feel special? BEVERLY: My lucid dreaming experiences continued throughout my teenage years. However, I never knew the term "lucid dreaming." I thought that everyone dreamed this way every night. I guess I liked the experiences, so I thought about them at night, in bed, before I went to sleep. I suspected that I was dreaming whenever I would have problems in a dream, for example, when all my teeth would start to fall out, when my contacts would grow or multiply, or when I would find myself on shooting elevators or on bridges that were too steep to drive on. I often dreamed of my close friend from high school, named Denise, She died in a car accident, when I was nineteen. At first, I'd see her, and we would continue as we would have when she was still alive. One time, I remembered that she had died. It scared me so much that I woke up. Afterwards, I learned to stay in the dream and talk to her. It took me time to get accustomed to hearing her voice, but I was finally able to ask her questions, and, eventually, listen to her answers. I felt very relieved to connect with her this way. It helped me deal more easily with my father in my dreams after he died, in 1992. By then, I was an expert! ROBERT: What other types of lucid dream experiences surprised you back then? BEVERLY: I would sometimes end a dream, think I woke up, yet find myself in another dream. These are called "false awakenings." Sometimes, I would 'wake up' ten or twenty times in a row, but usually the time it took me to realize that I was still dreaming shortened exponentially. For example, I would realize I was still dreaming when I left the house for the day in a dream. The next time, in a similar dream, I would recognize I was still dreaming earlier, when I was in the shower, and so on. Finally, I would still be in bed, waking up, when I'd realize I was still in a dream. I have gotten better at recognizing false awakenings through the years. ROBERT: So how did it happen that you met Stephen LaBerge? BEVERLY: In the late 1970s, I moved to California to finish my graduate work in computer science at Stanford University. Soon after I arrived, I went to see a dream expert to find out if I could learn to dream less often. I thought that waking up too often with dreams was disturbing my sleep. The expert asked me to describe some of my common dreams. When I did, she told me that my dreams were called "lucid dreams." She said lucid dreaming was a valuable skill that people were trying to learn. I was very surprised! I only saw her once, but many years later she showed up at a presentation I was giving on my lucid dreaming experiences. I decided that if I were going to remember so many dreams anyway, at least many of them were lucid! At the time, I was finishing a master's project with a Stanford Cognitive Psychology professor. I told one of his other students that I was a lucid dreamer. He said that I had to meet his friend Stephen LaBerge, who was doing his dissertation on this exact subject. After Stephen and I were introduced at an initial meeting, we discovered that we both did similar things in our lucid dreams. He asked me to try some things at home and report back to him. When he asked me to try spinning in a dream and see what happened, I already knew the answer. My somersault dreams were like spinning backwards. I used them to get into new dream scenes. Steven also found that spinning in his dreams created new scenes, as well. He attributed it to something in the inner ear that affected a certain part of the brain. ROBERT: Obviously you both shared similar interests in lucid awareness. Did that lead to being a research subject? BEVERLY: Stephen invited me to participate in some experiments at the Stanford Sleep Laboratory. I ended up sleeping at the lab and doing experiments about once a month for many years. I also did many experiments for publicity, such as television or magazine specials. I succeeded every time I was in the lab, except one time early on when the technical equipment failed. Before I came along, Stephen had used himself as the subject to show that one could be definitely in the sleeping state and signal the beginning of a predetermined task from a dream. He wondered how what we dream in our mind affects our physical body. For example, if we dream that we breathe slowly, does our physical breathing slow down? Although we can not, for example, cause our hearts to stop beating in a dream, in general, the activity of our dream bodies can be recognized as happening in our physical bodies, as well. ROBERT: So how did the research begin with you as the subject? BEVERLY: In the lab, I would signal from a dream, and my signals would be picked up by EEG machines in the lab via electrodes on my body. During this process, my brain waves, and other body functions, were also being monitored. They showed that I was unequivocally in the sleep state, particularly REM sleep, while I was signaling. The first time Stephen signaled in the lab, he squeezed his arm muscles in Morse code for his initials. When I tried squeezing my arm muscles in an experiment, the signal was not strong enough to register, so we decided on using a new signal. We used eye movements, because eye movement is not as inhibited as other body movements during sleep. I would move my dream eyes back and forth in the dream and the left-right movements, from my physical eyes in bed, connected to electrodes, would appear in the lab on the polygraph machine. I used a double left-right left-right movement to show that I knew I was dreaming. I would use a similar movement to signal that I was about to begin a task in a dream. I eventually decided to use to series of these, or four left- right signals, to say that I was waking up, or about to wake myself up. ROBERT: What other lucid dream research did you do in those early years? BEVERLY: After I demonstrated that I could have lucid dreams at will, every time I was in the laboratory, I did many other experiments that used the signals. After signaling that I knew I was dreaming and in a dream, I would signal that I was about to begin a predetermined task. One time, we decided I would sing a song, which should have activated a certain area of my brain, which was also being monitored by electrodes. It did. Another time, I did a more mathematical task of counting from one to ten, which should have activated a different area of my brain, just as it would while awake. The experiments showed that the same parts of the brain were activated while dreaming a task, as when doing it while awake. ROBERT: Did you ever have problems as a lucid dreamer on these research nights? BEVERLY: One time, I was in the lab doing an experiment for *Smithsonian Magazine*. My task was to get lucid, and then clap my dream hands to determine if an electrode on my physical ear would register the dream sound. In the dream, I signaled lucidity, but I couldn't clap my hands. A buoyancy compensatory had unexpectedly expanded around me, and I couldn't get both hands to meet. I had recently learned to scuba dive. A buoyancy compensatory is a device used for floating that expands around the center of the body. The part that the reporters didn't realize was that just as I was going to sleep, Stephen had whispered to me that maybe I could solve the ancient Zen koan of "the sound of one hand clapping." I believe that the reason my subconscious couldn't get my hands to clap was because then I wouldn't be making the sound of "one" hand clapping. During another lab experiment, my eye movements were being monitored, as usual. In a lucid dream, before I moved my eyes, I explained what I was going to do to the dream character that represented my friend Tim. He said, "Oh, you mean you move your eyes back and forth like this?" He then moved his eyes in this manner. After I signaled and woke up, we noticed that there were two eye signals recorded. Tim's eyes moving in the dream must have affected my physical eyes. This made me wonder if all dream characters are really aspects of the dreamer as well. ROBERT: It seems that the lucid dream research focused mostly on physiological correlations between dream experience and waking experience, rather than, say, the psychological meaning of dream characters, etc. Is that the case? BEVERLY: We did many more experiments in the lab through the years. I tried estimating time in a dream and while wake. The estimates turned out to be very similar. We believed that time sometimes seems different in dreams because dreams often work the way movies do. When scenes end in movies, often new activity from a later period begins immediately. In other experiments, I followed patterns with my dream eyes. For example, in a dream, I would watch my finger make an infinity sign about two feet wide in front of my face, and we'd compare it to my physical eyes following this same pattern while awake. Oddly enough, I would often do these experiments after working all day on my Ph.D., and performing all evening with my professional belly dance troupe. Talk about working 24 hours a day! In another ground-breaking experiment, I was in the Stanford Sleep Lab, hooked up to electrodes and vaginal probes. My goal was to have sex in a dream and experience an orgasm. I dreamed that I flew across Stanford campus and saw a group of tourists walking down below. I swooped down and tapped one dream guy, wearing a blue suit, on the shoulder. He responded right there on the walkway. We make love, and I signaled the onset of sex, the orgasm, and when I was about to wake up. We later published this experiment in the *Journal of Psychophysiology* as the first recorded female orgasm in a dream. ROBERT: Did dream lab work affect your normal lucid dreaming? BEVERLY: During this time period, while at home in my bedroom, I found myself in a dream. Dream scientists asked me to go to sleep in a chair. They wanted to study me. By falling asleep in a dream chair, I actually woke up, and I wrote down the dream. I went back to sleep, and I found myself in the same dream chair with the dream scientists. I asked them what they observed while they saw me sleeping, while I had actually woke up and recorded the dream. They said I was almost paralyzed, except that my eyes were moving quickly back and forth, left and right. Was my waking life a dream to these dream scientists? I began to use the process of falling asleep in a dream as a way to wake up. ROBERT: So what about your lucid dreams in the lab? Were they affected by the laboratory setting? BEVERLY: In the laboratory, I learned to wait until early morning hours to even try to have a lucid dream. After eight hours of sleep, it would be easier for me to become lucid. We found this to be true for most people. For example, I would say, "I will do the experiment at 7:30 a.m." I picked this time because it was before the office personnel would come in and begin to make noises. Picking a time, also made it easier for the media people. Instead of watching my brain waves all night, they could rest, and know exactly when to watch me perform live. I normally woke up after most REM periods, about every hour and a half. When I would wake up between six and seven a.m., I would then focus on my lucid dreaming task. This process is how we came up with the technique called "MILD," or Mnemonic induction of lucid dreams. In my laboratory dreams, I would often find myself in a lab setting, similar to the one in which I was sleeping. In my dreams, I would often joke with the dream characters who represented the lab technicians or the media people. Sometimes, I would fly over their heads for fun. I would always remember to signal at the point when I knew I was dreaming, and at the beginning and ending of any of my tasks. Robert: Was it odd having news media attention about lucid dreaming?" Beverly: Once, I was asked to do a lucid dreaming experiment at the lab for the television show 20/20. While being hooked up to electrodes used to verify my sleeping brain waves, I sat next to Hugh Downs, the host of the show. I had known him from television since I was a child. He wanted to try his luck at becoming lucid in his dreams that night. I became lucid easily that night, finding myself in a bed that looked like the one in the lab where I had fallen asleep. I got the idea to head towards Oakland, and maybe make it to a scheduled Grateful Dead concert. I got half way there, when I remembered that I was being filmed for a national television show. One of my goals was to bring Hugh Downs flying. I turned around midair and quickly flew back to the Stanford Sleep Lab. I looked for what I thought would be the wall of Hugh's room. I nudged him on the side and said, "Hugh, wake up! I have come to take you flying." He seemed very sleepy, so I took his hand, and I gently pulled him out of bed. We got to the coliseum just as the Grateful Dead were playing on stage. Because we were like ghosts, it was easy to merely float right over the band, in fact, directly over the lead guitar player, Jerry Garcia's, head. We had the best location in the place, and the music sounded especially clear and vibrant. The next morning, I asked Hugh if he remembered any dreams. Unfortunately, he didn't, but he seemed very pleased when I told him mine. The reporters interviewed me, but as far as I know the segment was never shown. ROBERT: Sexual desires seem fairly common in my lucid dreams and in most other lucid dreamers'. What this the case in your experience as well? BEVERLY: In my lucid dreams, I have had sex with dream characters who represent men, women, old people, young people, strangers, relatives, as well as people of various races and classes. I have been the woman, the man, half woman/half man, both split from waist, and with both a penis and a vagina. I have been a man with a man, a woman with a woman, an old man with young girls, with groups and alone. I have made love physically with myself in all combinations. I can barely think of some sexual situation that I have not experienced. These dreams are all very enjoyable and everyone is always totally accepting. I would sometimes give myself challenges while not in the lab, as well. In one very powerful lucid dream, I felt very sure of myself and decided to have sex with the next dream person who came down the street. I did so, right in the middle of the road, with no inhibitions. I gave myself a suggestion to remain lucid afterwards and it worked. However, I now found myself alone, in front of a campfire. I took this as another challenge and stepped right into the center of the roaring fire. I was having fun and decided to try eating the flames. Interestingly enough, they tasted salty. Next, I appeared with nothing physical around me, so I decided that I would fly up and merge with the sun. I sped upwards like superman, accelerating rapidly until, about half way there, I heard a great sound. It was very intense, and yet blissful. I felt extremely lucid for the next several days in both my waking and sleeping states. ROBERT: Any final thoughts about experiments or experiences in the lab with Stephen LaBerge? BEVERLY: During one lucid dreaming experiment at the lab, Stephen LaBerge asked me to try healing my stiff neck in a dream by rubbing my hands and directing the energy to my neck. I tried this in a dream, and I found sparks coming from my hands. The sparks set my hair on fire, and I spend the dream trying to put the fire out. Even I wasn't always completely lucid! In another lab experiment for a television special, I had to sing the song, "Row, row, row your boat.... life is but a dream." The week that the show was to air, they used a clip of me singing this song with electrodes all over my face, wearing my blue robe, for a commercial. It was shown several times a day that week. A few times, when I turned on the television, the commercial was playing and I saw myself saying, "Life is but a dream!" It was a very strange experience indeed! I decided it must be some kind of message from the universe, and I better pay attention. I was formulating the ideas that would eventually become what I now call, "lucid living!" ROBERT: Beverly, because you have so many great lucid dream experiences, we plan to continue this interview for the next LDE - and maybe even the one after that! Would you care to leave us with one of your favorite lucid dreams from this period? BEVERLY: This next dream serves as a good description of how our thoughts can create reality. I was in a lucid dream and I met a lovely fairy teacher who told me that she would give me the gift of seeing my thoughts manifest instantly in front of me. I found myself driving on a road around a large lake. I thought how nice it would be to be in a boat on the water. Instantly, I was sitting in a boat looking up at the road I had just been on. I was amazed. I must have imagined being in town next. In front of me on a dusty road, I saw a mysterious man walking towards me. He put his hand in his pocket. I thought, "What if he pulls a knife on me?" Sure enough, I noticed the blade. I was terrified, but just as quickly I tried to picture him merely scratching his leg. I was relieved when he did. Still, I was afraid that I would think more negative thoughts, and I wanted this all to stop. Yet, I didn't know how to do so. Finally, I decided to think of my bedroom and myself asleep. Sure enough, I woke up, and I felt that I had learned a great deal about how our mental states can affect our experiences. ******************************** The Lucid Dream Exchange is a quarterly newsletter featuring lucid dreams and lucid dream related articles and interviews. To subscribe to The Lucid Dream Exchange send a blank email to: TheLucidDreamExchange-subscribe@yahoogroups.com You can also check us out at www.dreaminglucid.com o|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|o Evolution of the Dream (From "How To Fly") © 2004 Linda Lane Magallon o|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|o http://members.aol.com/caseyflyer/flying/dreams.html (Dream Flights) If paleoecological studies identify an ancestral threat that occurred with high frequency in the ancestral environment and posed a significant selective pressure on ancestral humans...then we should find that the same theme is frequently simulated...during dreaming. Antti Revonsuo Flying dreams have been found across the world wide and down through recorded history. There are even cave paintings that seem to illustrate the vision of human flight. Of all dreams, flying has one of the best claims to be called "universal," although I doubt that an alien from Alpha Centuri would agree. With our species-specific myopia, we apply such terms with an appalling lack of concern for other corporeal life. It's not clear if the rest of the creatures on this planet have flying dreams. But I'd be willing to bet that birds do. After all, it's their day residue! But not ours. So why flying dreams? Why not, say, a plethora of dreams about being consumed by fire or burrowing through the soil or any one of a zillion other possibilities? Is there something in our human heritage that reveals the hidden sources of such common dreams? Yes, I believe there is. But even though I'm a researcher of mutual dreams, I don't think we need to hypothesize a "collective unconscious" to explain the phenomenon. This is not a dip in the shallow sea of psychological complexes or a Rorschach rumination. This type of dream is forged in the chain that links us to our basic building blocks. I'm talking about human DNA. The Aquatic Ape There is a theory that sometime in the distant past, our ancestors lived in an era of warm, shallow seas. The ice melted, the water rose, creating islands surrounded by ocean. We lived by the ocean; we were formed by the ocean. There are several living examples of mammals that have returned to the sea: dolphins, porpoises and whales, to name a few. Others live at the water's edge, becoming sleek and building up a layer of fat in order to better adjust to the water temperature and to become buoyant. Now, obviously, we never became mermaids, but, according to this theory, we did shift in that direction. Like other sea-edge creatures, we straightened out and elongated. We lost most hair, except on our heads, the part we poke out of the water in order to breathe. Two of our limbs, the legs, stretched to touch the bottom while the other two helped us retain our balance in the waves. While we waded and paddled through the surf, seeking crustaceans, fish and more, we probably kept our children close to us. So our infants are comparatively chubbier than other primates. Maybe we even birthed our infants in the water. Even today babies are able to swim, not merely before they're able to walk, but even before they can crawl. Babies have a swimming reflex, and breath-holding and diving reflexes as well. All of us have the ability to close nasal passages and throat and to hold our breaths, a skill needed for deep diving. We weep salt tears and copulate face to face. The seaside habitat may also have helped us develop the soft palate, along with our unique throat, vocal tract and resonant nasal structure, enabling us to enunciate words. And sing. As we stretched to become Homo Erectus, we had to learn to walk on only two feet. This is fine when we are in the water. But we pay the price when we step onto land. Standing erect means shifting weight from four limbs to two. Large amounts of weight on small amounts of body places stress on knee and hip joints plus lower back. Our upright stance places more gravitational pressure on heart, abdomen and lungs, which have to work harder than before to pump blood and move food and oxygen around the body. Muscles must compensate for our upright posture, creating tension and tension headaches. We literally feel more than we ever did before, more weight, more pressure, more gravity, especially when we become sedentary creatures. Reefs surrounding tropical islands can keep out the more dangerous ocean predators. Stretching out on our backs in the warm sun, bobbing in the water, is an experience of euphoria, very similar to the warm floating sensation of the womb. But we weren't in the womb, we had movable limbs. We could paddle. We could tread water. We could dive, flying through the water, until the air in our lungs naturally allowed us to ascend like bubbles to the top. To our nirvana of sweet, salty air. Upward was life. But the trip to and from was ecstatic, too. Even better, the buoyancy means we wouldn't have to worry about falling. We were supported, surrounded. Gravity didn't hold it's usual sway. Pain, pressure, stress was replaced by relaxation. We felt good. Floating in the sea, we enjoyed the lull of the waves as our bodies swayed in the surf. Thus, our instincts to hide or flee were developing concurrently with our ability to float and fly. Our fear of falling was more than a fear of gravity; it was a thwarting of natural support provided by the medium of water. So, in our dreams, we hover in free fall. We enjoy ourselves soaring and diving in an ecstatic echo of the ancient past. We're shocked when we fall. We wonder what happened to that warm, floating sensation that's supposed to buoy us up. Nice story, isn't it? Unfortunately, recent findings have revealed that it's largely untrue. A good portion doesn't "hold water," but some of it does. Water still played a crucial role in our evolution, as we will see. But first, let's look at its sister theory: the one on very dry land. Flight or Fight on the Savanna The most publicized explanation of evolution has life moving ever upward, from the bottom of the sea, out of the ocean, slithering, stalking, gliding, soaring towards the sky. Our mammalian ancestors were humble ground dwellers. At first. But there's a strong indication that, like many of our primate cousins, we took to the trees. And then the climate changed, the trees gave way to grasslands. We had to come down out of the trees and forage for food. Standing, walking on two feet, is more precarious that four feet. But being out of balance has its advantages if we direct the course of our natural propensity to fall. If we fall headlong, then break the fall with one leg, then another, we move ourselves forward, faster and faster. We run! The headlong stride is helped by growing longer limbs. Longer legs makes us better runners than short, squat legs. There's less time spent on the ground. The forward momentum helps counter gravity's pull. Arms in good proportion to the length of our legs means that, if we stumble, we can cartwheel or tumble on the ground, then rise and keep going. Running, running, running, looking desperately for safety up a tree trunk, but finding none on the savanna. Now, that's scary! And so, eons later, we run in our dreams, pursued by frightening critter or human monster, hoping to get airborne, but failing to find an altitude high enough to avoid grasping hands or toothy jaws. Another instinct has been honed to a fever pitch. Flight or fight doesn't mean literal flying, it means fleeing, getting away as quickly as we can. It's an instinctual preparation of the body for an active motor response to threat. Heart action increases, blood pressure rises, respiratory rate goes up. Being chased is by far the most typical theme in the recurring dreams of both children and adults today. Flying dreams often begin when a dreamer is being attacked and discovers, with astonishment, that it is possible to escape by flying away. How could we have flown in our ancestral environment? Well, hopefully we could still leap up into some of the dwindling number of trees. And when we stopped running, and our blood pressure fell, we might feel a "floating" sensation. But the best bet for "flying" is the result of running. When we leave the scary scenario far behind, running becomes, not escape, but enjoyment. Even today, runners can get a "high" by using forward momentum to defy gravity with every flowing interim between steps. So, flee during the day, fly at night. Ah, the runners of the plains! Makes for another good tale of the origins of our upright stance. Again, not well supported by fossil evidence. Falling From the Tree Tops Recent palaeoanthropological discoveries paint a different picture of early apes. Trees actually were part of the picture. In terms of predators, they were a comparatively safe place to spend the night. However, at the top of the forest, we'd be at the mercy of gravity. A momentary lack of vigilance, a single slip, could mean certain death. Hyper-awareness of our location in space would have become, not a conscious act, but a necessary instinct, adjusting our attitude automatically. Baby could rock-a-bye, curled up in a fetal position, in a nest of twigs and leaves, on a tree bough swaying in the wind. But baby would fall when venturing over the edge. Even today, the greatest cause of infant death among our cousin chimpanzees is falling from the treetops. Our powerful urge-to-life became so deeply embedded in our bodies that the least sensation of falling can rouse us from the sleep state. Fear of plummeting earthward haunts our dreams more than a million years after we were forced to trade arboreal existence for life on the ground. Thus, falling dreams are simulations of an ancient concern, with real consequences. They are easily activated, frequently repeated scripts designed by natural selection to be released in specific conditions. They are biological defense mechanisms the evolved in an environment where the threat of falling recurred over and over again for hundreds of thousands of years. This very long evolutionary history left a lasting mark on our dream production system. The system will make an attempt to describe current concerns using basic materials imported from our ancestral environment. The script will be reenacted whether or not we have actually encountered situations comparable to our ancient threats. We don't have to literally fall from a tree or cliff to have a falling dream. We just have to feel like we are. Getting Smart in the Swamp DNA evidence shows that, some 80,000 years ago, the path of humans took some of them out of Africa, across the Red Sea and into what is now Yemen. Their migration continued along the edge of the Indian Ocean to Australia and beyond. Before boats and rafts assisted in that trek, passage was by wading and swimming through shallow water from one nearby land mass to another. How could this be? Aren't we just land creatures? Perhaps not. About 4 million years ago, water flooded the area where our ancestors lived, probably isolating them on several volcanic islands. The old sources of food in the trees and on the ground were soon depleted. We had to learn to survive at the water's edge. Most apes aren't very fond of water; some are clearly afraid of it. But food is a tremendous motivator. Since the main food source was in the water, that was where we had to go. The earliest hominids were semi-aquatic wading apes, foraging in an environment that included forest, meadow, marshland and possibly the seaside. We were aquarboreal. All apes can stand and walk upright at least some of the time. As tree-dwellers we had already developed hands that can easily grasp limbs and leaves. We could stand on the ground and pick fruit and insects off the lower branches. To wade in water, using hands to gather food, we needed to stand squarely on two feet. Our famous cousin, "Lucy," had extra wide feet (an attribute that frogs and salamanders share). The riverside swamps and seaside marshes have predators just as dangerous as the grasslands and the forests, but they tend to be of the sneakier type: spiders, snakes, crocodiles. We'd have to be very alert to spot them (crocodiles are quite capable of stealth). Since predators roamed freely, we still had plenty of need to run in panic and leap for the trees. But if our infants fall from the tree tops over waterways, they won't sink, if they're pudgy enough. They can float. This might have been just enough time to grab them before the predators attacked. For all the dangers and fears, our change in diet turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The food we were gathering (fish and seafood) are linked with brain growth. As we got smarter, we could outwit predators better. Become the hunter instead of the hunted. During arboreal life, we had developed a hyper-awareness of position in three-dimensional space. This served us well when we entered the water. We waded, then swam, then learned to dive. Tree, land or waterways, we're built to move. It's healthy for us. Our children still remember this imperative. They have a lot of spirit and energy to keep in motion. Eventually, we grew into a new creature with a huge neocortex. Such an advancement results in the development of advanced tool use, intricate social behaviors and a complex spoken language. Finally, we had the ability to *talk* about our dreams. Especially those intensely powerful dreams that have us moving swiftly, fleeing for our lives. With a plentiful food source there was more time for leisure. Time to lay on our backs and look skyward, at the birds soaring through the air. The sky was freedom; it had few, if any predators to threaten our existence. When we closed our eyes, we could retain the image, the memory of the birds in flight. Still, it was not an idyllic world. In addition to predators, there was illness and injury. Like other animals, we seek out plants that numb pain (and often give us a high, besides). Floating sensations from mind-bending chemicals imbibed during the day can attach to our memories of flight and build flying dreams at night. Evolutionary Dreams In evolutionary terms, therefore, flying has its origins in two main instincts: escape from predators and escape from pain. In those strange dreams that reprise our frights, our fights and our flights. In those euphoric dreams that are lifted by a medicinal high. In either case, the best scenario replaces an extremely bad sensation with a good one. We're motivated to go beyond the panic and agony, all the way to a peak experience. In other words, there's a reward at the end of hurt and fear. In time, we learn we can get the same high sensation without using plants. And without having to go through the pain and strain. In our dreams we float in ecstasy or run until we fly. Flying helps us flee, but not from ourselves. Dream flying is bred from an urge to keep the body from harm, to take it along for the ride. Thus flying is the unification of mind, spirit *and* body. Now that's freedom! http://members.aol.com/caseyflyer/flying/dreams.html (Dream Flights) * Hutchinson, Michael. The Book of Floating. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1984. * Kuliukas, Algis. River Apes. www.riverapes.com (3/04). * Mavromatis, Andreas. Hypnogogia: The Unique State of Consciousness Between Wakefulness and Sleep. New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1987. * Morgan, Elaine. The Aquatic Ape: A Theory of Human Evolution. New York: Stein and Day, 1982. * The Real Eve. Discovery Communications, 2002. * Revonsuo, Antti. "Did Ancestral Humans Dream For Their Lives?," Sleep and Dreaming: Scientific Advances and Reconsiderations, Pace-Schott, Edward F., Mark Solms, Mark Blagrove and Stevan Harnad (Eds.) Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 275-293. * Revonsuo, Antti. The Reinterpretation of Dreams: An Evolutionary Hypothesis of the Function of Dream. http://goodelyfe.healingwell.com/dreams/Dr%20ar.htm (3/04). o|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|o Lucid Living On The World Dreams Peace Bridge The World Dreams Peace Bridge A View from the Bridge Jean Campbell o|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|o If any of you have ever dreamed, as I have, and at the same time been aware that in the dream you were both awake and walking through a glass door, feeling your molecules and the molecules of the door form and reform, then you already have an idea of the magic potential of lucid living. In the dream, we can do many things impossible to us in ordinary waking life; yet the lucid dreamer recognizes the connection between the dream and waking life in a very particular way. If I can be awake in the dream, aware that I'm dreaming, can I not be aware in waking life that this might be a dream? And if this is a dream, might not the impossible be possible here as well? I have no particular desire to walk through walls in waking life, but I have a very real desire to live in peace. I desire a world in which children are free to dream, rather than living in fear that the next gunshot might kill them or their father or mother. I desire a world in which conflict, though it certainly will continue to exist, might be resolved by peaceful means; and I desire a world in which the incessant greed of a few does not lead the many to lose sight of the fact that our dreams promise endless abundance. Because of these desires of mine, in October 2001, not long after the terrorist destruction of the World Trade Centers in New York, I invited a group of friends from around the world to join me on The World Dreams Peace Bridge, in what has proven to be a grand experiment in what I define as lucid living. Now, the group of dreamers who make up the Peace Bridge, some of whom are here in this room, have many different backgrounds. They come from sixteen different countries around the globe; they are of different faiths; they are as young as twenty-one and as old as seventy-five. But they share one thing in common, a belief in the power of the dream. And out of this belief has come a hope—that by utilizing the power of the dream we might, in some way, begin to attain the second goal all of the dreamers on the bridge share: a world filled with peace and abundance. The World Dreams Peace Bridge has an active discussion group of around sixty-five people. Unlike some online discussion groups, where months go by without a post, on the Peace Bridge there are always a dozen or more posts each day. It is probably of interest to note that the majority of dreamers in this discussion group, whether they be from Australia, Japan, the United States, Germany or Holland, are fairly practiced lucid dreamers. I believe this fact, this shared experience of lucidity, is the glue which holds the group together. Many members of the group have other types of psi dreams: precognitive dreams, telepathic dreams, shared dreams, giving them a common belief about the flexible nature of time and space. But the experience of lucidity may be the commonality which gives birth to the hope that global change is possible. The Peace Bridge is a freewheeling place, in which dreams, ideas, creativity, and longing for community are all expressed. There are no rules, past that of kindness and respect for one another, yet out of this multitude of voices have evolved several clear and distinct ways to promote and foster lucid living. All of this has been, to me, a rather magical result of the fact that three years ago I sent an e-mail to some people asking if they wouldn't like to join me in an attempt to dream up some peace. It is these tools for lucid living, which have grown spontaneously out of the Peace Bridge, that I would like to share with you today, along with examples of where use of these tools might lead us. Honoring the Dream Peace Bridge member, Sandy Ginsberg, who is also a member of ASD, has written for ASD's magazine _Dream Time_ about honoring the dream. She was doing this before she ever joined the Peace Bridge, but her work inspired both some of the early art exchanges on the Bridge, and ultimately an entire dream art gallery on the Peace Bridge web site. Here is what she says in an article published on the World Dreams site: "We run the risk of postponing the gift from the dream when we fail to take action. By honoring the dream creatively, we allow the dream's message an opportunity to be delivered to us. By honoring the dream, I am referring to the conscious effort to manifest a part of the dream in the waking world. This creative act can take form as visual art, earthwork, food preparation, music, interaction with another or an activity or journey that is calling to you." In the context of a group of dreamers, communicating with one another online, this idea of honoring the dream has taken on new dimensions. Here is just one example: On July 26, 2002, Jeremy Seligson from South Korea had a dream about a peace train. "Our long black locomotive travels across the country to Washington, D.C.," he said in his dream report to the group. "A large white banner around the smokestack reads, 'PEACE TRAIN.' This makes me joyful." What we soon discovered was that other members of the Peace bridge began to dream about trains too, and before long there was a discussion about creating Peace Trains around the world. Of course, the result has been not just an honoring of Jeremy's dream, but an honoring of the dream all of us have for peace on Earth. The first of the Peace Trains was created by children in South Korea, but since then trains have been created in Australia, in Israel, in Turkey, in the United States and several other countries in the world. In Australia, Peace Bridge members Nick Cumbo and Victoria Quinton have facilitated Peace Train workshops, and Nick has designed a web site, www.PeaceTraining.org. One teacher from the United States plans to take the Lorikeet Peace Train, which began in Australia and traveled to schools in Washington state and Virginia, to Trinidad this summer. And most recently we received the first of the pictures drawn by children in Iraq for the Iraq Peace Train. As Jeremy writes in his "Call for Peace Trains": "Whereas our planet is in jeopardy—children live in poverty; violence is everywhere; the air is filthy; and ice caps are melting—we call upon ordinary people of the world to join us in a cry for peace by reaching out with your hands and building a carriage for a Peace Train, or even an entire train. "A Peace Train is an art form—with an engine, carriages and caboose…." You can view some of the Peace Train art created by children around the world at Jeremy Seligson's presentation during this conference. And you are welcome to join us in the creation of trains as they begin to link people to one another the world over. Setting the Intent The second approach to lucid living discovered by the members of the World Dreams Peace Bridge is known among dreamers as setting the intent for the dream. When we speak of lucid living though, we are also speaking of setting an intention or focus for waking life. From the beginning of the Peace Bridge, people often asked for dreamers to dream on a particular date for a particular purpose, which might be for an individual healing or for the children of Afghanistan, or any number of other things. Not infrequently, dreamers would share similar dreams themes or dream about one another during these times. Finally last year in April, Kathy Turner from Australia asked, "Is there a name for this type of focused, intense peace dreaming we are doing?" And a conversation began about this on the discussion list. Before long, the group came up with a name; one which like the group is multilingual. It's a combination of Japanese, Chinese and English that we call DaFuMu Dreaming, or Big Dream of Good Fortune. So if you would like to do a little world dreaming with someone, just ask them to DaFuMu. I'd like to give you just one example among the many available, of how this type of dreaming interacts with waking life to create greater shared lucidity. On November 20,2003, I woke before five a.m. and went directly to my computer. Because the World Dreams Peace Bridge spans the world, someone is always awake. I found a message from Ilkin Sungu in Istanbul saying that bombs were exploding again. Earlier that day, four terrorist bombs had exploded in populated areas of the city. Immediately I sent a request to the Peace Bridge and other online dream groups like the ASD Dream Activism group, for DaFuMu Dreaming for the people of Istanbul. There were several dreams reported to the Bridge the next day, but I am going to start with one of my own, because it involves all of us here in ASD. When the dream begins, I am sitting in the dining room of a big house where ASD is having a workshop. Yvonne Baez from Mexico and I are sitting cross-legged on the floor, facing one another. I am explaining to her about permeable and impermeable boundaries in dreams. Then later all of the people in the house lie down on the floor to go to sleep. We are awakened not long after that by Alan Siegel and Bob Hoss coming in the front door. Soon everyone is awake and up again. In the next scene in the dream, I am flying in a helicopter that Bob is piloting. We are flying across a bay spanned by the Bosporous Bridge. I look to my right. Ahead of us is a convoy of helicopters. I am worried that they are US helicopters getting ready to bomb someone. Then I look to my left and see a winged figure backwinging to alight on the land below. At first I think it is an eagle, the US eagle, and I'm afraid again. But then I realize that it is an angel. Bob smiles. There were many other shared images which came from this night of DaFuMu dreaming, but the one which most closely connected with mine came from a dream sent by Yvonne Baez, who was present in my dream. Yvonne wrote that she forgot to set her intention for the DaFuMu dreaming before she fell asleep, but two hours later something woke her up. "I felt Jean's presence right in front of me," she said "and immediately began to send peace and love around the world." Yvonne also sent a dream in which she is in a swimming pool with a friend who is having a crisis of faith. Suddenly, in the dream, Yvonne says, the clouds start taking on the shapes of big angels all around. "I tell my friend, 'Look up to the sky! There are many angels above us,'" Yvonne told us. "She looks up, but sees nothing." In her message thanking the group for the DaFuMu dreaming, Ilkin wrote that on that night each year Turkey celebrates the feast of Qudar: "It is believed in Islam that tonight is the sacred night on which God sends all his angels to the world to listen to the prayers and forgive sins," Ilkin said. When I announced my intention to write this paper to members of the Peace Bridge, Kathy Turner again spoke about DaFuMu dreaming to the group. Her words summarize far better than mine what DaFuMu dreaming is really all about. "I think the DaFuMu is a real tool of lucid living," Kathy wrote. "A DaFuMu enters by conscious intention into the collective consciousness, and seeks to shift the possibilities held there. It seems to me it is a practical application of the ideas inherent in Jung's collective unconscious and the Eastern idea of universal awareness. But what is revolutionary, and perhaps even evolutionary, is that rather than merely seeking to experience the collective Unconscious (as in the traditional Jungian view of dreams) or seeking to align our consciousness with universal consciousness (as in the Eastern view), the DaFuMu actually uses the conscious intent to shift the possibilities held within the collective consciousness. Now clearly the shift cannot be dramatic and won't deliver "what we want," as I feel the field we are reaching is one of possibilities rather than actualities. But it will shift possibilities, and that opens up something new. "Unlike the traditional means of shifting possibilities (e.g. prayers to God—understood by me as another name for this field of collective consciousness) the DaFuMu actually uses one of the Prime Means by which the collective consciousness is more or less directly available to us. I suspect that makes our conscious intent more powerful in effect. To me, all this means the DaFuMu is a revolutionary tool of Lucid Living." "Second," Kathy goes on, "the DaFuMu also creates the possibility of new ways for the individual dreamer of relating to the world. I have not forgotten the DaFuMu dreams from before the Iraq invasion. I've read them over many times to see what it is about them I find so interesting. What I notice is that almost every dream is either an experience of peace or displays ways to find peace. Now that means we were able to lay down in our minds the possibility of a new pattern, that of peaceful relating, or to confirm that pattern within us, giving it more strength." There were several responses on the Bridge to what Kathy had to say about DaFuMu dreaming, but I think one of the most insightful came from Ralf, who said, "I dream peaceful solutions more often since I am on the Bridge." But additionally he made this comment: "We don't know much for now of how the thing works, but information may be an important part of the psychodynamic (in the sense of energy). So it may be that new thoughts, ideas, solutions may have a unique power. This is an important factor in homeopathy too. The system changes when the right information is applied." Ralf is not only a nurse, but a healing practitioner who uses homeopathy. He has also studied and practiced lucid dreaming techniques. An interesting note to this discussion of DaFuMu dreaming came from Pam, who teaches college students in Washington, D.C. "I am always behind with e-mails, so frequently I don't have conscious awareness of when we are doing group DaFuMus, but when I check my journal I almost always dream of friendly groups and have vivid recall during those days." Cultivating Community Those of you who are familiar with some of my earlier work with dreams know that I have spent quite a lot of time researching group dreaming, or mutual and shared dreams in the group setting. It has not been surprising to me to see the number of mutual dreams which arise from the dreamers on the World Dreams Peace Bridge, since I believe that groups of people often share dreams spontaneously. However, there is an element of what happens on the Bridge which I think is very pertinent to lucid living, and that is the conscious attempt to cultivate community. Rather than being a six-week class or an eight-week experiment, the World Dreams Peace Bridge is an ongoing activity, week after week and month after month, for members from all over the world. As we say in our logo: "There can never be too many people dreaming of Peace." The result of this type of ongoing dreaming, combined with ongoing discussion of dreams, ideas, thoughts, and reflections on daily life has been that not only have dreams been shared but profound changes have occurred for many of us, particularly in the realm of understanding people from other cultures. Let me tell you about an incident of shared dreaming which relates directly to this ASD conference. When the bombing of Iraq first began, despite the protest of millions around the world, we people from the Peace Bridge held DaFuMu dreaming for the children of Iraq. It is sobering to know that over seventy percent of the population of that small country is under the age of eighteen. The first night of the DaFuMu, I dreamed of a young Iraqi girl, maybe five or six years old, running to greet me with her arms outstretched and a big smile on her face. Her image has stayed in my mind and heart. Then starting in March of this year, almost a year to the day from when bombs began dropping on Baghdad, I began dreaming about this ASD conference. Night after night I was dreaming about working in the kitchen to provide food for all the people at the conference. I was often accompanied by this same little Iraqi girl. In fact, these dreams prompted my final decision to come to this conference, even though I could ill afford it, because they spoke to me about the importance, at the world level of what we are doing here. Now you understand this was not DaFuMu dreaming, only my own compulsive personal dreams. Nonetheless, two other members of the Peace Bridge shared my kitchen dreams, Rita Dwyer and Jody Grundy. Both of these wonderful ladies suggested that I take a break from the work, go out and sit in the yard and have a cup of tea. This is the type of community I feel is built with endeavors like the World Dreams Peace Bridge: loving, caring, sharing and compassionate—a real example of lucid living. There are also deeper and even more important issues that I feel are addressed within the context of the Peace Bridge community, when I think about lucid living. Many times, I feel that our dreams, even our lucid dreams, and our work with them, is quite insular. What I mean is that we tend to believe that even the language of dreaming is the language of my native tongue, whether it be English or German, Dutch or Japanese. We believe that the culture represented by dreams is mine, my own familiar world. To some extent this attitude is perfect as a background for people to learn about lucid dreaming and lucid living. But if we are truly considering living lucidly in the world, as citizens of the world, then it may be necessary to confront the other: that is to confront the deepest, most culturally ingrained beliefs and feelings about otherness and separation. Particularly in a time of war, it may be necessary to confront the question of just who is the enemy. Naturally, if people share their lives with one another daily, as we do on the World Dreams Peace Bridge, there is ample opportunity for this type of confrontation, and often with remarkable results. A most recent example of what can result from this sharing, as it's done on the Bridge, arose from a post from Jeremy Seligson entitled: "My Mother Died in Hiroshima." In this e-mail, he detailed the cause of his mother's death, which happened when Jeremy was five, as proceeding from the fact that his father was at the time Manager of Budget for the Atomic Energy Commission and the family lived at the US Nuclear Testing Facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Breast cancer, from which Jeremy's mother died, was found to be the most common cause of death from cancer to result from the type of nuclear bomb tested at Oak Ridge, and also dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima at the end of World War II. The response to Jeremy's post was enormous within a group with active members from China, from Japan, from Germany, Australia and the United States. In fact, the issue touched us all, in terms of histories in the cultures in which we grew up. I will not tell the entire story here, since it was used as the April, 2004, "View From The Bridge", which is published as a monthly column in Richard Wilkerson's E-Zine, Electric Dreams and as a monthly update on the World Dreams Peace bridge web site. (You can read it there at either www.dreamgate.com or www.worlddreamspeacebridge.org ) But I would like to share one or two of the results of discussion around Jeremy's post. As people began to realize the implications of what Jeremy was saying, May Tung wrote from San Francisco: "Don't forget the Chinese when we talk about Hiroshima. I grew up in World War II, remember the fear and hatred we had for the Japanese. Through my family was fortunate enough to move to the safe region, the Japanese were pushing closer and closer. That kind of fear and panic, feeling your back is against the wall with no more ground to retreat…. We CELEBRATED when the bombs were dropped and Japan surrendered." When Kotaro wrote a response from Japan, he mentioned how as a young man he had often thought about what he would have done if he had been asked to fight for his country during World War II. "There is no 'if' in the history," he wrote, "but I think I would be certainly one of them if I was born in those years. I would try to be a good soldier for Hirohito and God blessed country. This imagination always terrified me." "Dearest Kotaro," May wrote back. "Here we are, a Japanese and a Chinese, with genuine affection for each other. As a matter of fact, dear friend, you alone have made more basic difference in my feelings toward the Japanese than any other single factor. I have felt close to you, respected you, since the beginning." She added to this: "How do we promote peace? By posts like these on the Bridge. Right, everybody? Non of our hands are totally without blood." In answer, not long after this Ralf had a dream which he told the group. In this dream, Ralf is an agent whose job is to kill Hitler, who is speaking in front of a group of people. After much difficulty, Ralf is finally able to kill Hitler. Not long after that in the dream, just as if a computer had been rebooted, Hitler appeared again, doing exactly what he'd been doing before. In his commentary on the dream, Ralf wrote: "I see that we need to fight for democracy itself all over the world, even in the so- called 'democratic countries' like the US and Germany. We need to fight for democracy and peace in our personal relations and we need to fight for a peaceful way of living together globally and locally. We can't wait for any administration to do that…. We need to modify the operating system. Any killing of dictators seems to be no use in the long run. Global Windows XP needs an update, urgently." As we have found on the Bridge, the Internet provides a kind of communication particularly suited to lucid living. There is something about the immediacy of the Internet communication and something about the isolation of that communication to just our written words, that seems to focus our connectedness. A plea for support, whether it be from Jody with her son's friends in the army; or Anna with her son, or Stephen with his father's death is met immediately with a flow of love from around the world. And as time is no longer a definer of communication, the love flows literally "around the clock". In turn the support generates its own momentum in waking life. As Anna said after a DaFuMu dreaming for her and her son, "I feel so humbled in the face of this. If that (support) is there for the asking, then it follows so naturally that my heart opens and desires to pour out too!" The Internet also enables an easy linking with other peace groups around the globe. Just an email message is sufficient for us to become aware of the strength and vitality of another desire for peace. Chayim, a resident of Israel, entered our group seeking to spread knowledge of his Hands Across Jordan project to help peace in the Middle East. We are now working with Chayim, cheering him on in his own peace activity. Just as with dreaming, even lucid dreaming, the particular quality of focus and immediacy the Internet provides, is no substitute for the far more messy, rich waking life connections. We all meet in a cyberspace and dreamtime, yet there is a pull to waking life connection. Some of us have translated that into waking life meetings. There is growing awareness of the joy of "hearing" a voice on the phone or meeting someone who exists only in written form. Recently Stephen is welcomed Chayim from Israel, to his home in Virginia, in the US. Chayim has mentioned flying members of the Bridge to Israel for the Hands Across the Jordan date in November. Such world connections, made at the level of the individual, create the groundwork for peace. Taking Action on the Dream What Ralf says about the need to reboot the Global XP may sound amusing, but certainly one of the things that dreamers on the Peace Bridge have discovered about lucid living is the need to take action on our dreams. That means listening to our dreams, whether they are lucid or non lucid, listening to the advice and suggestions of the wise dreamer, and carrying these actions forward into the waking world with some sense that dreams do come true, can come true, that the reality of the dream with all its vast improbabilities can become the reality of the waking world. As soon as the bombs began dropping on Baghdad, many of us were impelled by our dreams to reach out in some way to the people of Iraq, particularly the children of Iraq, to demonstrate a dream of solidarity and peace. Ever the wise woman of the group, May Tung counseled this: "We are not a large group," she said, "but we can do something small and personal. We can provide toys and art supplies for the traumatized children of Iraq." And that is how the Aid for Traumatized Children Project was begun. For the first nine months of its existence, the group within the Peace Bridge who chose to participate in this project collected funds while looking for some way to send packages and to make contact with therapists and others who were working with children in war-torn Iraq. Even though we were turned back time and again by UNICEF and other organizations, who told us that our project was too small, too insignificant, we began to establish a network of contacts within that country—again thanks to the Internet, which allows for e-mail to travel even though there may be bombing in the next town or the next block. Finally, in January of this year, through the help of Nobel Prize nominee Kathy Kelly and her organization, Voices in the Wilderness, we were able to make contact with the Season Arts School in Baghdad, and the group of university graduate students who were running a program for children designed to deal with the trauma of war. In January, the first of our packages were purchased in Istanbul, including musical instruments like a guitar and an aud, drums, jumping ropes and soft, cuddly toys. Ilkin Sungu from Turkey, a country which forms a natural bridge between Europe and the Middle East, ahs been our point person on this project, devoting endless hours to shopping, shipping and writing e-mails to our friends in Iraq and elsewhere. I wish you could see the expressions on the faces of the children who have been touched by the generosity of the people on the Bridge—and their friends, for of course we have sent letters and e-mails to other people we know, asking them to contribute. We have made four shipments now, and plan more. Through the magic again of the Internet, we were able to receive photographs of the children receiving the toys from the Peace Bridge. These photos can be seen on the World Dreams web site. We are still carrying on this dream-inspired action of lucid living, and you are welcome to contribute if you'd like. We discovered in the process of the Aid for Traumatized Children Project that much of what we were doing with this project was very similar to what we were already doing on the Peace Bridge: making connections, one person at a time, one moment at a time, with other dreamers around the world, and especially reaching out to the children. A most inspiring result of this work came to us not long ago from the children in Baghdad, photographs of the first drawings, for the first cars on the Iraq Children's Peace Train. These are truly some incredible drawings. And they are part of the display of Peace Train art, which Jeremy is showing in his presentation here at the conference. And so we have come full circle, in a way, have we not? The primary goal of lucid living is to awaken the dreamer to the fact that waking life and dreaming life may be one and the same, that we can erase the barriers between the two. If waking life informs the dream, then so certainly does the dream inform waking life. The dreams of children in Iraq, translated into art, into drawings for a Peace Train, send us all a powerful message, a message about our common humanity and our common need for peace. Can we become lucid in our waking lives? I believe so. Before ending today, I would like to thank all of the Peace bridge dreamers for their contribution to this paper, whether they were quoted or not, because they are the people who make this work possible. And I would like to thank Rosemary Guiley, who devoted half of the Dream Activism chapter in her new book, The Dreamer's Way, to the work of the Peace Bridge. Thank you all for listening too, and if you would like to become a peace dreamer, there are directions for joining the discussion group at www.worlddreamspeacebridge.org Thank you. ****************************************************************** Spectral Waves: The Quest for the Holy Grail Spectral Moon, White Spectral Wizard Year © Ron Adams 2004 ****************************************************************** The Waves is a newsletter reporting on the explorations underway at the Sea Life forum. We take a community approach to dreaming, running monthly dreaming projects to learn more about our world, and the evolutionary path before ourselves and our planet. The Quest for the Holy Grail: http://sealife.dreamofpeace.net/viewtopic.php?t=1433 During the Spectral Moon, we were joined with Dream Alliance on The Quest for the Holy Grail. John, a member of a group Dream Alliance was led to Dreampeace through a dream, calling for guidance on other groups whom his group could hook up with, in promoting world peace through dreaming. Last year, we joined Dream Alliance in a magical adventure to Mt. Shasta. http://dreamofpeace.net/thewaves/04mtshasta/ This year, John suggested we share in 'The Quest for the Holy Grail': "The Quest for the Holy Grail seems very timely. As the Mayan Calendar winds down to 2012, humanity is facing a choice. We can either pursue the one-sided, male-dominated, authoritarian war paradigm or we can choose to bring balance to this approach by adding the Sacred Feminine principles to our lives. The Holy Grail has been thought to be the cup or chalice used by Christ, but Christ used allegory and metaphor extensively in his teaching. The Holy Grail is now being considered by many to represent the Divine Feminine. "The Quest for the Holy Grail" can be seen as the opportunity for us to re-claim the Sacred Feminine within us all. This Sacred Feminine may manifest as the Goddess in Her many forms, or as Mother Nature, or in any form that promotes the togetherness of the Universal Network of Being. Our dream group here in Arizona has seen her as Mary, Kwan Yin, Isis, Brighid, as well as in messages from whales and dolphins and woodland creatures who have come to us in dreams. The Grail has been associated with Avalon, the misty Isle, and with the Druids. Any dreams with these images could be looked into for contact with the Grail. Ask for messages from the Divine Feminine. Share them with us, as we will share what we get with you. May we find and share in the Holy Grail together." We used this link to improve our understanding of the project: http://www.lilithsophia.com/ The Quest for the Holy Grail included many dreams on the feminine, healing, creativity, intuition, and even the 13 Moon Peace Calendar. There were many great dreams about this Quest. We discovered we were dreaming of each other and finding out some suprising things about the 13 Moon Peace calendar colours, the colours of the Tibetian Flag, dreaming about other dimensions, and Goddesses like Isis. There was a strong connection with Compassion and our Creativity as human beings on Earth. Sunwolf kicked it off with a partial dream recall: ------------------------------------------------------------------ ---- HALF EMPTY OR HALF FULL I went to bed reading parts of "Chalice of Ecstasy" by Charles Stanfield Jones 1918 piece on 'Parsival' legend that Richard Wagner set to music, an opera on the Holy Grail. "Religious ecstasy takes place in the highest centres of the human organism." "In ritual therefore, we seek continually to unite the mind to some pure idea by an act of will." The piece said we do this continuously, to find some sort of religious ecstasy. In my dream, which was very detailed, I was working with some poweful woman with raven black hair, on Sea Life. She was having me reorganize some files. It made perfect sense in the dream. I woke up, not remembering who she was or what we were reorganizing. It felt like tweaking what we had, making it fit into a bigger picture. I do remember thinking to myself I couldn't wait to tell Explora. Anyway suffice to say it led to a very nice Full Moon ritual tonight. I got to explore some of the concepts of the dream, without even remembering the details of the dream. Very interesting. I just let my subconscious fill in the blanks. My ritual was basically about invoking my striving for genius and higher ideals, by filling the sacred cup, continuously. It gave me a whole new insight into the old adage "Is the cup half empty or half full?" Doesn't matter, drink what is there and fill it again! ------------------------------------------------------------------ ---- This set off a trend of the members of this Moon's quest dreaming together. During the course of posting Sunwolf put up a picture of a Jaguar avatar, and this triggered a chain of events for John (Dreamster) and later Sandy (GreenEyes). ------------------------------------------------------------------ ---- FREE THE TIGER (JOHN) Sunwolf, It is remarkable that you are posting the picture of the large cat with your name. That is one of the signs I was looking for. I had this dream in April: I was in a large field with my dream group. A breeze came up and I lifted my arms to a horizontal position and began flying. As I flew above our group our members waved at me. I came in for a landing and noticed a large building nearby that resembles our meeting hall. We all walked over and entered the hall. Inside there was a rope extended the length of the room, dividing it in two. Over the rope hung oriental rugs, which made the whole thing look like a huge Tibetan Prayer Flag. One of our dreamers climbed up on top of the rugs to sit on the rope. He said to us "There's a message up here". (We often ask for messages in our dreams). "What does it say?" we all asked. "It says, Free the Tiger", he answered. This has set off a whole series of dreams related to freeing the tiger within us....in order to serve the Goddess. ------------------------------------------------------------------ ---- Then there was the T-shirt connection with both Nick and John. The first night John dreamed he was wearing a T-shirt that read "Let Christ live through you". Perhaps a symbol of the Cosmic Christ, John felt. Nick's dream had a t-shirt that read "REAL Beauty Standing Up". John felt that perhaps the t-shirt messages were for the males in the group from 'the Divine Feminine'. Nick later dreamed of a journey to 2012, he shared with the feminine power within, and the importance of him creating a set of oracle cards based around the maiden/mother/wisewoman trilogy in order to honour and support this aspect of Self. John also reported that another Dream Alliance team member had a dream 'he was receiving an award for an esoteric mathematical formula that he came up with. The equation was several pages long, and very complex. On the last page this huge equation came down to 6 over 3, which reduced to one half. I believe it symbolized that we all represent one half of the answer. Waking life is one half, dreaming is one half, Male is one half, female is one half, light is one half, dark is one half, matter is one half, spirit is one half.' John (Dreamster) had a healing dream for a friend: ------------------------------------------------------------------ ---- "A friend of ours, the mother of our daughter's best friend, went into seizures yesterday. She had recently had a stroke. She helped me edit one of my books and is helping with a new book on lucid dreaming. We went to visit her at the hospital and she said to me that she really wanted to know what all of this suffering was about. She asked me to talk to Quan Yin about it. I promised I would. Last night I set my dream intent to ask for healing for our friend. In my dream, I was at the beach. I saw a grand old mansion on the beachfront and the gate was open. I walked in and saw an old woman sitting in a wading pool. I intuitively knew she was a recluse, she had been a very beautiful young woman and now didn't want anyone to see her. I approached slowly and she turned around and made a funny face at me, but I knew it was alright for me to join her. We sat in the pool and an old man joined us. He had a watering can and started to sprinkle water over me as he sang a song in a language I didn't know. The water felt wonderful, and somehow it didn't leave me wet. The dream ended. I drew a tarot card for the dream and again got the King of Cups (upright). I feel that in asking for help for my friend, an older woman, I received some kind of blessing myself. I believe the Goddess appeared to me as the crone, and the watering can was the chalice or grail. I can't wait to tell our friend about the dream." ------------------------------------------------------------------ ---- Sunwolf's Many Dolphins Dream (where he and GreenEyes had a synchronicity with the image of playing the Guitar: ------------------------------------------------------------------ ---- MANY DOLPHINS DREAM First dream me and four guys were camping out, trying to escape some gangs. Lars gets a cell phone call that some kids are setting fire to his parents house. Suddenly there are guys surrounding our camp. They grab this main dude we were hiding because they think he stabbed someone in their gang. This gang leader pulls out a list of occult groups, and I read it, rather long, I'd say about 20 names, TOPY, and Marriage House, all occult groups I recognize. He says they are going to feed me to the Earth. Next dream we are at a friends house. We are going to put The Book of the Law to music. I sing a little bit of it and Dave says that's nice, but we have to lay down some rhythm tracks first. Dave asks GreenEyes if she has her bass guitar and she says it is at home. Someone says there is a toy ukulele and GreenEyes says its worth a try, better than nothing. I go for a walk. It's a beautiful spring day in Boulder. I walk from North Boulder to the ocean, which in the dream is only a few blocks away. At the ocean I remember the scene and I say this outloud. This little girl DC overhears me and says "Oh, this has been here for a very long time." The Ocean water level is very low, the oceans are dying. These creatures looked like long whitish-yellow bones that have dried in the Sun, and then I noticed that they were slowly moving, they were alive. I couldn't help but notice they felt like whales, their heads looked a little like dolphins. I asked the little girl what they were called. She replied "Many Dolphins." Like that was the whole name. Before I could ask her to explain herself, the solid concrete I was standing on in front of the metal rail turned to mud and I started to slip. I cried out: "I don't want to go now." The dolphin/worm was edging towards me, opening a gapping mouth. The little girl handed me her dolly blanket. I wrapped it on the metal railing above us and pulled myself up. When I was standing again, I woke up. ------------------------------------------------------------------ ---- Sage mentioned to use to pay attention to the colors in our dreams, which led to GreenEyes having an interesting dream connecting the colors of the Dreamspell with the Tibetan Flag, especially the Colour Green: "I can only remember one dream. The dream would start and I would wake up, then I would go right back into the dream as soon as I went back to sleep. Over and over. I was being shown the colors blue, red, yellow and white against a flowing dark background. Sometimes they were shaped like the 13 moon avatars, but mostly I saw bars of each color about 2 fingers wide, one color at a time. I was supposed to repeat the colors. I kept trying to stick green in there somewhere and I would hear, No. Just these colors. Finally I said, Okay! Just primary colors! I didn't have the dream any more after I said that. I can still see it in my mind. I've been thinking about my artist supplies. I think I need to get them out and be creative. I really can do anything with just those primary colors." ------------------------------------------------------------------ ---- And GreenEyes had another dream along these lines, which continued the Tibetan flag dream. A dream of celebration of life and peace: ------------------------------------------------------------------ ---- All of Sea Life was at a colorful lovely peace festival. Beautiful blue sky. We were going to hang prayer flags. The colored prayer flags had each of our latest dreams of peace printed on them, but it was printed in Tibetan. Nick wanted us to read them as we attached them to a braided hair rope (?) to hang them. My dh had printed out a stack of them in English. They looked like printed emails. I was handing them out as fast as I could. At the same time I was whining about the Holy Grail assignment. Sunwolf stepped up with a dark-haired girl and said, Stop! You know what you think. Just write it down for Pete's sake! I blinked at him a few times, realized he was right and went back to handing out people's dreams. Nick was saying, Hurry up! We're using up too much time! All of us were smiling and trying to hurry. ------------------------------------------------------------------ ---- GreenEyes dream sums up the whole quest: the Search for the Holy Grail is a search for COMPASSION: ------------------------------------------------------------------ ---- "My time leading up to bedtime and sleep last night was hectic and noisy. A television was still on as I drifted to sleep. I was a bit annoyed that I wouldn't have a few quiet seconds to set intentions. I thought, What intentions would I set?.... the holy grail?....the white tiger?....find spirit guide?.......the women of the tiger dream with their blowing black hair was the last thing I remember thinking about... I dreamed a lot of things, but I can only remember small pieces. Each bit happened very quickly, just a few seconds each. I'm going to put them here, because they feel somehow important. I am looking down from the sky at a man figure outlined in white on a brilliant green hillside...... I am with someone dressed in dark green. I am wearing old leather, brown and soft. My hair is long and curly blond. We are scrambling through a cave with boulders everywhere. We are trying to figure out a way to climb up to the top of the cavern to get some little crystal tubes hanging there...like stalactites. We urgently need them for flutes. I am determined! We are hurrying and dirty and the little tubes kept getting further away...... Hip-length glossy black hair swinging back and forth in front of me, like someone walking. I want to touch the hair and see if it is as soft as it looks. As I reach out my hand, I think it might be a man...... I am being shown letters, one at a time, to form a word. I am supposed to guess the next letter. Like a gameshow or something. The first letter is a C. I thought, Cup! I guessed the next letter would be a U. An indistinct figure of a woman sitting on a boulder shook her head at me and gave me another chance. I was like, Whuht? I know she's going to tell me It's a cup! and I tried to buy a vowel or something foggy.....She laughed and I could see her right hand come down clearly in front of the rock, like into light while the rest of her was in shadow. The rock seemed to be made of brown velvet. The edge of her long sleeve had wine-colored crochet on it, about as wide as my thumb. The pale hand started to pull the red-lettered card (with fancy brown design all around the sides) out further--in order to see the next letters. The next letter was an O. Everything started to tilt and I realized I was falling! I heard a woman's voice say, Wait! Everything blurred as she pulled out the rest of the card and I felt/heard rather than saw the word COMPASSION" ------------------------------------------------------------------ ---- It seems like the quest never ends, in fact even though the moon is over, Dreamster and his group are still dreaming of the Quest for the Holy Grail. It was definitely a fun journey to share with everyone in the group. ------------------------------------------------------------------ ---- Stay tuned next month for the results of our 'Journey to the Galactic Center'. We welcome new dreamers to join us in our adventures. Email Ron: sunwolf@dreamofpeace.net The Waves: http://www.dreamofpeace.net/thewaves/ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ** DREAMS ** DREAMS ** DREAMS ** DREAMS ** DREAMS ** DREAMS +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ _ Talking with dead people, flying spirits, flashing Virgin Mary eyes, dying whale in a bathtub, and dating a serial killer…What do they have in common? They are in the Electric Dreams Dream Section. Be sure to read all of these dreams and more. If you want to send in dreams, enter them at dreamflow@dreamgate.com. Date: 5/20/04 From: Anonymous Dream title: none Dream: I keep on having dreams about my grandmother that had passed away in August of 2003. My dream about her is that we (the family) are at her funeral and she gets up out the casket and she walks around (this dream happens often). Can you please help me what does this mean does it mean that she isn't resting or what? Date: 5/30/04 From: Anonymous Dream title: Thirsty Dream: I was dreaming that I was very thirsty and I kept on asking for water. Date: 05/31/04 From: momof2 Dream title: Spirits Dream: My dream took place on the military base in Iwakuni, Japan. There were a bunch of people in this house which had a wooden screen door. These people and I were just walking around when the screen door opened up and in came a dust cloud with these things I can only describe as spirits (maybe 2 ft long with a gray outlining of their body and what was supposed to be their eyes and mouth) flew in and started attacking us. They would fly through individuals, killing them. These humans would disintegrate into powder. I ran out the door and could feel that one of these spirits had seen me and was after me. I ran for a little bit and then picked up something in my hand, not knowing what it was, threw it at the spirit and it turned and disappeared. At this time I saw this older woman staring at me. She then turned and walked off before I could talk to her. I went in search for her. In my mind she knew something I didn't. All around this base in Japan I saw these dust clouds and knew that people were being attacked. I kept thinking that it might be a terrorist attack and some country had released these things on us. I also couldn't understand why everyone was so calm about these attacks. They were going on about life as normal and only freaked out when attacked. After some time I went in to a local market and found this woman I had been searching for. This woman asked me if I was able to see these things. I said yes and she told me I was the only one that could and that people were searching for me. She asked me if I knew what I had thrown at that spirit. I said no and she showed me 3 lima beans. She was eating them thinking that if one flew threw her they wouldn't be able to kill her since what I had thrown was those and it scared them away. She gave me those 3 lima beans and I put them in my pocket. I also noticed that inside the store, people were frantic trying to buy these beans thinking it would protect them. As soon as they would walk out the door they were completely calm again. I went in search for this guy I used to work with. He's a Christian and I kept thinking that I needed to find him to see if he knew something about these things that I didn't. There were 3 buildings in a row, 4 stories high, and about a mile apart. I ran to the first one to find only another branch of the military living there and started running to the 2nd building. At this point I woke up completely disturbed. If anyone has any insight to this dream I would greatly appreciate it! I'm searching for some dream interpretation. Date: 6/1/04 From: Anonymous Dream title: Shoes Dream: I was at some type of gathering like a party, and my boyfriend's daughter was there. She had been molested and was in a lot of pain. The thing is that in my mind I thought that my boyfriend had done it to her. It was so weird that his ex-wife was there also. I was caring for his daughter and I went to help her take a bath and the whole time I helped her, the thought that he had done this was in my mind. It seemed so real like if it was really happening and I was not dreaming. The whole time the party was going on and I thought to myself, how can everyone be so normal about this, as if it did not happen? Date: 6/1/04 From: Confused Dream title: none Dream: I stand outside my old boyfriend's house. I want to meet him but his mother tells me that he isn't home yet. So I wait with a friend. The scene just mysteriously changes to being inside an institution. And I pick something up off the floor and then he walks past me. I catch up to him and greet him. I then go back to my friend, because I am so excited. The boy I like walked into this main room with a huge dome to wait for me. Then I go to where he is, sit on his lap, and give him a kiss. Date: 6/4/04 From: "C" Dream title: Nightshift Dream: I had one of the most intense and scary dreams I have ever had in my life last-night. As soon as I woke I thought it must have been morning but I had only been asleep for less than 90 minutes, I felt exhilarated yet scared all the same, I tried to write down what I had dreamt this is what I wrote (I haven t a clue what any of it means??!):- Come out of the edge of darkness, I am at work my first nightshift. Working okay. In bed trying to watch a Brazilian football match, look over to a work colleague he said something (?) look back no Brazilian football match where s the football, there s a shrug of shoulders. Step out, anymore work I am thinking? Mental head never seen before, looked like an electrician electricians everywhere, telegraph poles everywhere underground?? Person says wasted tonight, this is mental what has he done another says in answer all sorts, I feel scared of these new faces I'm thinking what's going to happen? I walk past a work colleague who I know and I say hello. He doesn't acknowledge me, he becomes distracted he sprints to a bloke, he's fallen off he says. I thought you had fallen off he shouts he goes to help, other colleagues I have not seen before approach. I looked at the injured he looks ok but very high. I broke my leg this time he says, grinning manically, almost proud. He's in a room, he shakes his ankle. It is broken and he is shaking it. I shriek and sprint away scared. I sprint past people they ask me what's up he's broke his leg I say. Not another one they say, totally without emotion, as if it was as a matter of fact. I legged it a bit further. I glance in to a room: loads of other people have broken arms, legs, and worse, amputations in progress. In my place of work dark underground I start taking the boxes in, they keep piling up outside, more and more, I work faster and faster try to keep up, I am, I enjoy it annoyed of the work but its there and I keep up. Something outside I am holding a torch, something is coming in my direction, I am on the edge of darkness I sprint away in a total daze, very light headed, I don t know what s going on. I come around it is the early hours, see an old friend he's like my guardian angel I feel safe. I see a fete (bouncy castle and stalls that sell marmalade) and a hotel everybody I see I know but I do not know their names. I go in to the hotel looking for a short cut to get underground around and around, over and over to get underground faster I feel intense that I need get there. This girl fancies you say my old friend all these strangers saying hi, they knew me!!! I don t think I knew them (?) maybe. I am at work no you're not you're in **** (a place name, a local town about 5 miles from where I live). I sprinted, went in to the hotel made even more of a scene this time hurdling tables and chairs guests where did they come from?! I am not at work I go down, the gate is locked I can t get in, there s a basket outside the gate. I ask my friend what the time is he says a time to me, I don t know what time but I should be at work and here I am in **** (local town same one as above), I must get back. Go down a hill as everybody leaves not thinking straight, people look at me mysteriously suddenly all is quiet I m all alone in a housing estate rows and rows of houses I must get away from this place scared intense go one way then next fake to go in the opposite direction who am I running from- more intense still must get away railway crossing across road everything s clear I can visualize everything, wide rail ways more than one track three I can see a train as I approach it is coming from the right a smoking locomotive, I can t slow down I am approaching the crossing from above, I swerve to the right hoping to miss it, my feet hit the first tracks before the train I get an electrical buzzing sensation wow I thought...I am stood on the track I jump off the track look to my right and see a stranger on railway track coming towards me . Am I trapped?????!!!! Date: 6/4/04 From: Pam Dream title: Whale watching Dream: We were on the beach and whale watching. I witnessed an undecipherable mammal, which could it be a whale or a dolphin. It sprung out of the waters as another one, this time, the baby whale, also followed. Date: 6/5/04 From: Anonymous Dream title: Mother and father who are already dead Dream: I was talking to my father first who died in 1992. I also dream that my mother is talking to me too (who died in 2001). They are trying to tell me numbers but I cannot remember the numbers. What does this mean? Date: 6/6/04 From: Scary Dream title: The shiny nan Dream: My nan died on September 8. On my birthday, I had a dream about her. She was in a old trailer and I was looking in on her and she was smiling at me. She was shining, while I was looking in on her. I started to cry and she looked at me and she looked like she wanted to hurt me. I know that she wouldn't do that. She started to chase me to my uncle's house that wasn't far from the old trailer. I started to fly and she turned in to a crow. I would like it if I can find out what it's suppose to mean. Date: 6-3-04 From: Anonymous Dream title: Mice and devil Dream: The devil put mice in my pocket . Date: 6/5/04 From: anonymous Dream title: none Dream: I constantly dream my husband is sleeping with other women. My husband is very flirty towards other women and I have found condoms in his wallet as well as phone #'s. Date: 6/9/04 From: Ianoah Dream title: People from the past Dream: I have reoccurring dreams of people from my past doing ordinary daily tasks with me. The people are from all parts of my past. For example, my third grade teacher, a girl I went to high school with (that I never have spoken with before), a guy I worked with eight years ago and I are all riding in an elevator together and laughing about the color of the carpeting in the hallway of a bank that I visited halfway across the US a year and a half ago. The dreams seem pointless, are never confrontational or dealing with important or even current events. They also never involve people or events from my current life. The only common denominator is that they bring together people from various parts of my past that in all probability have never nor will ever know each other. These dreams have been happening every few months for many years. They don't really trouble me, I just find them intriguing if not perplexing. Where are they coming from? And for what reason? Date: 6/9/04 From: Reema Dream title: The neighbor Dream: My neighbor gets inside my refrigerator and tries to break its back. It's as if she wants to look for spells or put a spell on it. She has a lot of ice from the back of the refrigerator. My kid's nanny watches her with surprise when I come in. The neighbor sees me and she immediately leaves the refrigerator and tries to explain ...then I woke up from my dream afraid Date: 6/11/04 From: hennayume Dream title: Desperate to find a place to live Dream: Three different dreams simultaneously: I am housekeeping in a very nice house. I keep thinking I will be able to find money or something to sustain living there, but I don't know how to get it. I need a lot I recall. After a few days I become delusional and believe it to be my house. I love the carpet it is very plush. All I remember is a big huge room that is never lit brightly enough and the rest of the rooms being so dark I don't go into them. I never really feel too at home there and it feels more like a total drug haze. I like being there and feel very high but then I am coming down and I am severely depressed toward the end of my stay there and I realize I won't be able to stay. I remember when they came home, everything became a total blur. I remember before they came home I was walking on that carpet I liked, but it was dimmer and harder to focus on. I wished at that moment that it was as i had seen it earlier and that I was still that happy. In the second dream, I am driving looking for this house that will be very cheap to live at. It is very far away in a place I have never been to. I remember the names of the cities and they are real cities I have driven through before but nothing like what it looked like in this dream. I remember getting out of my car and there was this drama at a house. I wanted to rent out the shack or something in its backyard. It was a dark brown house and the property sloped down so the house was lower then street level. There were kids involved and it got kind of weird. But I never really found a place. For one, it was too hard to find and the house I did find had too much problems going on in it. The third dream is I am trying to go down a driveway of my old friend's house from childhood. Everything is so completely changed I can't go down the driveway and everything is all wrong. Date: 6/12/04 From: Anonymous Dream title: Is this trying to tell me something? Dream: I had a dream that my friend and I were running up a lot of staircases and each set of stairs lead to a different cellar. When we got to the top cellar we saw a person/thing dressed in black and started walking towards us so we jumped off the top floor into my aunt's backyard near a close line. My friend disappeared and I walked over to the BBQ area and my cousin told me to read a letter. I read half of it but then I woke up. When I was awake something told me to go back to sleep because there was a very important message in the letter. So I went back to sleep and read a bit more but then woke up again. I kept on going back to sleep and waking up. When I went back to sleep, I returned to the exact same dream and the same part of it. Could you please help me out this dream feel very significant to me and I feel like I must find out what it means. Date: 6/12/04 From: Susz Dream title: Anthrax Dream: There were classes going on about skin anthrax. my cats and I had gotten it at a beach. It caused the inside part of my arms to itch and have a rash. A girl was near-by she had medicine for it in a spray bottle. She seemed drunk or something and was bragging about the medicine. I was talking to her and I managed to get the bottle from her and she didn't even notice. It was herbs and water in a spray bottle. I yelled to everyone around in the class to come over here and look at it, we were at a beach area. Date: 6/13/04 From: geepers89 Dream title: Eyes of the Virgin Mary Dream: I was standing next to my husband. We were looking face to face at the Virgin Mary. One of her eyes was brown and the other was blue. They would then alternate, one blue, the other brown, one brown the other blue, flashing back and fourth. The Virgin Mary looked scary, perhaps even dead. I turned to my husband and said, "Remember when I told you that I had this dream?" "I told you about this dream!" I started sobbing. He said, "No, I don't remember." But I knew he was lying. I have no idea what this would mean. Date: 6/14/2004 From: Barbudo Dream title: My Brother the Orca Dream: I had a realistic dream of a white tile bathroom with a tub half full of water. There was a small Orca or Killer whale (black & white) in the tub thrashing and flopping around. My younger brother came into the bathroom and as he approached the whale, he vaporized and became the whale. I realized that the whale was dying as ink (Like a squid's ink) was coming from his tail and out his mouth in periodic spurts. The whale thrashed when ejecting the dark liquid. With each fit, he weakened. Eventually, he pushed over a flap at one end of the tub and slid into a small tiled room or cave hidden behind the end of the tub. I could see him flipping and knew he would die soon. I awoke. Date: 6/14/2004 From: Danielle Dream title: none Dream: I keep seeing a young man I met at this trade school 2 yrs ago He is wearing a tux & holding a rose with a smile. What does this mean? Date: 6-15-04 From: Me Dream title: Sex with a stranger Dream: This dream was about me having sex with a total stranger, after having sex he said he had to find out if I was any good. And then he disappeared just like that. Date: 6/15/04 From: xxashiebabie Dream title: Fight Dream: I had a dream last night that a younger girl that I hate was walking through my high school. She was walking towards me and when she saw me coming she started walking in the opposite direction real fast. So I followed her and kept provoking her by stepping on her shoes and pushing her. She didn't do anything so I grabbed her by her hair and starting hitting her in the middle of the hallways. Everyone was still walking like nothing was happening. The thing was that when I was hitting her in the face it wasn't hurting her and the punches just would go like I wanted them to. Plus she wouldn't even fight me back, so I let her go and I woke up. Date: 6/15/04 From: sunflower1359 Dream title: Dream of cat Dream: There is cat and he is trying to be friends with me, but I don't want it. I am not acting like that I like this cat. Finally I am getting angry and hit the cat and after I did that the angry cat bit me and scratched all my hand and my arms. What that mean is any one know? Date: 6/15/04 From: anonymous Dream title: none Dream: The dream I've have that sticks in my mind is my teeth. It seems so real; I can feel it and almost taste it. Most of the time, it starts with me becoming aware that I'm in a dream and I start to touch my teeth with my tongue. One feels loose, and then they all start falling out. They start to break in half then into small pieces, and then I start spitting them out. At the same time, my mouth will fill up with more small pieces of teeth. It happens so fast that I start gagging and can't close my mouth. I then try to get them out with my hands but it's happening too fast that I wake up. In the last 10 years, I have this kind of dream about 4 maybe 6 times a year. Date: 6/16/04 From: Kel Dream title: Frustration Dream: I keep dreaming that I need to be someplace at a certain time and everything is ok then close to the time that the event will start I can't seem to find stuff to finish getting ready and am always late. Although, I wake up before I ever make it there. The dream is just frustrating looking for objects and I am just exhausted and stressed when I finally wake up. I keep having this dream over and over again but it is just different situations that I need to be someplace. Date: 6/16/04 From: anonymous Dream title: Helpless Dream: I have been dreaming lately of a dark figure over my bed I can hear him breathe and it's like he is holding me down. I am awake but I can't move my body only my head. I try and scream but nothing will come out. It feels like it is attacking me and afterwards I cannot move and feel like all my energy is gone. I'm terrified. This has actually happened to me more than 5 times wherever I go I got a rose quartz and it has not happened since. Date: 6/16/04 From: Rach Dream title: Serial killer dream Dream: I've been having reoccurring dreams about serial killers but this is the one I dream most often: I am on a date and I never see the guys face, anyways, we are having a good time and all of a sudden he turns to me and says, very casually "by the way I'm a serial killer" and I ask him if he's going to kill me he says "no" and we just continue on with our date. It doesn't even bother me that he's a serial killer. So we go back to his house and he starts telling all the different ways that he kills people and he shows me the body parts he's kept as "trophies" and he shows me a woman's heart and I say to him "I love how this piece captures the woman's innocence" as if it were some painting or art form. Then I wake up. This dream feels so real that often when I wake up I have to ask myself if it really happened. I would love any input on what this dream means. Date: 6/17/04 From: Lilly Dream title: Apple of his eye Dream: I've lost my dad 2 yrs ago & was the apple of his eye- his most beloved child. He was my emotional anchor in my life & I miss him terribly. He's been appearing in my dreams & dying in my arms. I never got to see his dead body &couldn't attend his funeral since he died in another country, though I got to see & visit his grave later. I seek his advice & guidance even now & he answers me I feel his presence around me & also in my house. He appears to my younger sister too when she is under any stress or turmoil. (I'd foreseen all these events before he died but wouldn't or couldn't accept it as he was my beloved dad & I knew that I'd hearing this news on the day he died)I'd like to know more & grow. Date: 6/19/04 From: Anonymous Dream title: none Dream: I've had this dream over time. This dream always seems to be in a public place. There is an attractive woman with shoulder length blonde hair and light brown eyes. She always is friendly to me and wants to talk but I want meet her even half way. After awhile she turns to leave with a sad look upon her face and I'm left feeling lost. Date: 6/19/04 From: AM Dream title: Old Friends Dream text: I often dream of a friend that committed suicide about 3 years ago. In my dreams I can see him so clearly it's frightening. I run up to him, hug him, and tell him that I love him. We are usually in a public place - a party, a store, etc. Sometimes I am the only one that can see him, other times my friends can see him also. He tells me he had to disappear for awhile, get his life right. When my friends see him, they still tell me he's dead, but we can see him! I can feel the warmth of his skin, his breath, hold and talk to him. Comments: This dream happens to me about every other night. It scares me and depresses me. I didn't go to my friend's funeral, and I really think I should have had that closure. Even after I wake up, I feel like I'm looking for him - just keeping an eye out. My dreams just started this year and he's been gone for awhile. I just don't want to have these depressing dreams anymore. My anxiety is so high in these dreams I usually wake up in the middle of them. -------------------- END ISSUE ----------------- -===-===-===-===-===-===-===-===-===-===-===-===-===- =---=---=---=---=---=---=---=---=---=---=---=---=---= ELECTRIC DREAMS ACCESS INFORMATION =---=---=---=---=---=---=---=---=---=---=---=---=---= -===-===-===-===-===-===-===-===-===-===-===-===-===- Subscriptions: The Electric Dreams E-zine (issn 1089 4284) is *free* and distributed via email about once a month. You can have Electric Dreams delivered right to your email box by sending an e-mail Subscribe: electric-dreams-subscribe@yahoogroups.com Online: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/electric-dreams Unsubscribe: electric-dreams-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com ================= SUBMITTING DREAMS and Comments about Dreams: EASY! Electric Dreams will publish your dreams and comments about dreams you have seen in previous issues. If you can, be clear what name you want or don't want. Most people use a pen name. 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You can subscribe and send in dreams directly or drop them off anonymously at http://www.dreamgate.com/dream/temple The archives for DREAM-FLOW are at http://www.mail-archive.com/dream-flow@lists.best.com Post message: dream-flow@yahoogroups.com Subscribe: dream-flow-subscribe@yahoogroups.com Unsubscribe: dream-flow-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com List owner: dream-flow-owner@yahoogroups.com URL to this page: http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/dream-flow ================== SUBMITTING ARTICLES, projects and letters-to-the-editor. http://www.dreamgate.com/dream/electric-dreams/publication.htm Electric Dreams is responsive and experimental. If you have articles or suggestions on dreams, dreaming or dreamers - including book reviews, movie suggestions or conferences and meetings, we will publish them. I'm especially interested in creative interpretive approaches to dreams, including verbal, dramatization, and mixed media approaches. Send to: Richard Wilkerson =============== SUBMITTING NEWS and Calendar events related to dreaming. We usually have a deadline at the 15th of each month. Send all events and news to Peggy Coats SENDING IN QUESTIONS, Replies and Concerns about dreams and dreaming. We don't pretend to be the final authority on dreams, but we will submit you questions to our network and other Internet networks. Also, you are free to post special interest requests. Send those to Richard Wilkerson at edreams@dreamgate.com JOINING DREAM GROUPS sponsored by Electric Dreams. If you are interested in joining a group to discuss your dream with peers, contact Richard Wilkerson, rcwilk@dreamgate.com JOINING DISCUSSIONS ON DREAMING. Electric Dreams supports the following discussion groups on dreams and dreaming: -------- DreamChatters dreamchatters-subscribe@yahoogroups.com http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dreamchatters ---------- The DreamWheel http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dreamwheel dreamwheel-subscribe@yahoogroups.com dreamwheel-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com ---------- DreamShare http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dreamshare dreamshare-subscribe@yahoogroups.com dreamshare-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com ---------- World Dreams Peace Bridge http://www.worlddreamspeacebridge.org/index.htm Subscribe: worlddreams-subscribe@yahoogroups.com Unsubscribe: worlddreams-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com ELECTRIC DREAMS - DREAMGATE HOME PAGE ON WEB: http://www.dreamgate.com/electric-dreams NEED A COVER for your issues of Electric Dreams? We now provide them and you can download them at http://www.dreamgate.com/dream/ed-covers/ BACK ISSUES OF ELECTRIC DREAMS: WEB: http://www.dreamgate.com/dream/ed-backissues/ ARTICLES BY AUTHOR http://www.dreamgate.com/dream/ed-articles/ Thanks to John Labovitz for putting us on his e-zine list: http://www.meer.net/~johnl/e-zine-list/zines/ electric-dreams.html Thanks to the Dream Network Journal for mentioning the Electric Dreams project. DreamKey@lasal.net http://www.dreamnetwork.net Thanks to the Usenet newsgroups for mentioning us in the FAQ files at alt.dreams and alt.dreams.lucid and for other Usenet Newsgroups for allowing us to continually post messages. Thanks to our many web links! See http://www.dreamgate.com/dream/resources Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z= The Electric Dreams Staff (Current) Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z=Z= Peggy Coats - Global Dreaming News E-mail: web@dreamtree.com http://www.dreamtree.com Nick Cumbo – Electric Dreams PDF Archive http://www.dreamofpeace.net/community/electricdreams/ Phyllis Howling - Dream Wheel Moderator (eDreams list) E-mail: pthowing@earthlink.net Victoria Quinton Electric Dreams Archives & Reporter DreamChatters Host http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/dreamchatters mermaid 8*) E-mail: mermaid@alphalink.com.au http://www.alphalink.com.au/~mermaid Lars Spivock - Research and Development Director E-mail: lars@dreamgate_remove_to_email_.com Dream Section Editor Kat Peters-Midland http://www.rmdjournal.com/ Archive Specialist Janet Garrett http://www.improverse.com/ed-articles/index.htm Richard Wilkerson - General Editor, Publisher, Articles Editor Subscriptions & Publication E-mail: rcwilk@dreamgate.com http://www.dreamgate.com o|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|o All dream and article text and art are considered (C)opyright by the writers, artists and dreamers themselves. Anyone other than the authors may use or reprint the text for non-commercial use, but all other use by anyone other than the author must be with the permission of either the author or the current Electric Dreams publisher. o|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|o o|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|o DISCLAIMER: Electric Dreams is an independent electronic publication not affiliated with any other organization. The views of our commentators are personal views and not intended as professional advice or psychotherapy. o|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|o