Listening In Dreams

FOREWORD

DREAMS: A SNEAKY REVOLUTION !

Dream Awareness is a form of attention, a form of listening, that when incorporated into our daily living processes, enables us to lead richer and more authentic lives.

I suggest that the boundaries we impose on our relationships with other humans and even our relationship to the phenomenal world can soften without effort-simply through the sharing of dreams.

The true spirit of Dream Community de-emphasizes analysis and the linear figuring out the meanings of dreams, allowing the dream figures and stories we conjure to live and breathe without running them through an existing psychological theory.

Through using a dream journal or notebook, and paying attention, we gradually begin to understand our own symbols and stories. We, like many indigenous peoples among us and before us can in the most harmonious sense of the term, live our dreams.

I have been facilitating dream workshops and seminars, small and large, for many years now; and I continue to be intrigued by the amazing softenings of shyness (or just plain old resistance) that can occur once dreams have been allowed to ‘live’ among the participants. This is one reason why I say, dreams never disappoint me. Somehow, they manage to yield surprises, magic, fun as well as serious messages. As such, they offer us all an enormous gift that is easily accessible- as simple as bringing non-judgmental awareness to them, and sharing with a friend, a family member- a colleague -even a stranger what dreams are happening for us, in us and around us!

Since I first wrote This is a Dream! and Listening in Dreams, many new Deep Listening® Certificate Holders have graduated with EARtificates from the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. They continue to join an ever expanding community of dreamers.

It was 2015, when Pauline Oliveros, Heloise Gold and I launched the first DL Certificate Programs along with CDL’s first director, Tomie Hahn. The Center for Deep Listening's current director, Stephanie Loveless, continues Pauline's extraordinary vision with a steady and compassionate hand.

Pauline Oliveros, founder of Deep Listening, was a composer, futurist and a pioneer in telematic performances, She consistently embraced the outer edges of technology with gusto, and was very excited about the online programs. These programs are based on our 27 years of Deep Listening Retreats, presented in the US and internationally, and fueled by Pauline’s many years of research on listening, moving and dreaming.

The retreats began in 1991 in New Mexico 8000 feet up in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Rose Mountain, Heloise’s brother, Andy Gold’s small retreat center was just right for us. There, among the rock formations and shimmering aspen forests, Pauline was able to fully develop and teach the practice and processes of Deep Listening. Tai Chi specialist and dancer, Heloise contributed Taoist teachings and powerful movement in the meadows and rocks, and I brought my dream studies and practice to the mountain. There, we were able to practice 24 hour listening, incorporating the sounds of the day as well as the sounds of the night into our time together.

These three modalities became an essential template for Deep Listening studies.

And so it was that along with Deep Listening itself, and Deeply Listening Body, the concept of Listening in Dreams expanded in ever widening circles from the mountain out into the world.

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Yet, as I write, our world is caught in the thrall of CoVid 19, the Novel Corona Virus. As the deadly Virus has spread throughout the world; to the surprise of many, people have begun to notice their dreams in new ways- so much so that the phenomenon of dreaming has made it from its usual marginalized position to the mainstream media.

Newscasters have seemed astonished that they are really exclaiming about dreams! Psychologists are being brought in for sound bites of reassurance about the weird Pandemic dreams that are presenting themselves.

Some of the dreams are disturbing, reflecting the anxieties of the day. I view this as a healthy response. Precious space is being made in the psyches of millions. The Pandemic is a shocking wake up call that is somehow uniting. Multitudes have begun to come to terms with mortality, the fragility of life in a new way. 

The Black Lives Matter movement has taken hold in a new way after the world witnessed George Floyd, a Black man being murdered by a white policeman. Centuries of systemic injustices and inhumanity to Black people in the United States has forever been memorialized by this horrendous act, viewed by millions on video.

The spaciousness created by the world wide virus has also opened the way for monkeys, deer, bear and many other animals to move in closer to cities. while humans are quarantined in their homes.

The waters in the canals of Venice, the most beautiful dream city in the world are becoming clear again, welcoming beautiful water creatures who have stayed away due to pollution.

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Perhaps you can picture this dream with me: I’m seeing one of those spacious official conference rooms, and at the center, a large highly polished oval table- and around the table I can see some of my favorite and also some of my unfavorite world leaders.

Surprisingly, it becomes clear that rather than discussing matters of government-they are taking turns telling their dreams. What’s more, matters of world government are somehow surfacing from their crazy /interesting/ sad/ beautiful and downright weird dreams.

They are, it seems, truly listening to each other’s dreams. In my reveries, these world leaders, responding to the authentic feelings of their colleagues, experience an unexpected empathy toward each other. Consequently, they begin to find new ways of conducting world business. Out of the box suggestions, solutions to long entrenched problems begin to pop up.

Taking things further, I foresee that the results of these new ways of being will have a trickle down effect on countries, states, counties, cities and towns. Not to mention, individuals and families, animals and mountains, rivers and streams, the forests and rocks and plants of this planet.

Yes, that is my vision for a re-balancing of our relationships to ourselves and to the universe. It would be a sneaky, soft and admittedly slow revolution, one in which more and more of us begin to pay more attention to our dreams, lifting off self-judgment and judgment of others. We would allow our creativity to flourish, listening, appreciating, acknowledging the thin veils between dreaming and waking. We would begin to fully appreciate the Dream of Reality and the Reality of the Dream.

This way, I believe we can begin to dream a new dream for our world.

IONE,

July, 2020

For additional bibliography and links on dreaming, including ongoing participatory events, kindly go to: Ministryofmaat.org

INTRODUCTION

Is there a tonal order in dreams, as there is in music and poetry? I suspect there is. In these two books this order is explored and in Listening in Dreams, the presence of sound in dreams is investigated and described specifically. This concept opens new avenues of adventure for the reader. Ione holds dreams with curiosity and love and hears their resonance, the song embedded in the dream image, the language, archetypal and personal, that emerges through dreaming. Dreams: enduring and evanescent, elusive and bold, with landscapes that are pedestrian and revelatory, sometimes simultaneously. All of these paradoxes are included in This is a Dream! and Listening in Dreams. 

The books describe the experience of dreaming and the skills and intuition that support using dreams as potent resources. Simultaneous meanings and a multiplicity of approaches are offered as means to cultivate dreams. Ione regards dreams and the wisdom that nourishes them with an intense focus, yet does not crush them with the weight of academic interpretation. Each dreamer's personal concept is cherished. The dreamer is understood in a variety of ways: as an individual and also, potentially, as a member of a community, one who touches the pulse of the group and presides over its well-being on many levels, including the physical, emotional, creative and spiritual.

When Ione called me and asked if I would write an introduction to This is a Dream! and Listening in Dreams, I immediately remembered the way we met. As the Aboriginals say, we dreamed each other up and connected in the physical world in 1979, introduced by composer Philip Corner. To me, the meeting was more like remembering; Ione felt so familiar, our connection not so much begun as one continued. In addition to introducing the books, I want to introduce my experience ofher. 

Like dreams themselves, Ione is multi-faceted, many layered. She has always struck me as a woman gifted with a regard for life that perceives all of it as precious and worthy. And fascinating. Thus she imparts the artist's sense of the mythic, a sense she expresses through her way of listening. In this way, the speaker is enfolded in her high regard for their life, for their story and their dreaming. These two books are filled with that mythic quality of consciousness and they portray both dignity and humor in the approaches she suggests toward dreaming. Personable and charismatic, Ione's soft voice has great power and impact; I cannot remember ever hearing her raise her voice, yet even in large groups, people immediately focus their attention on her as soon as she addresses them and they remain engaged. In a similar way, the books are engaging, involving the reader in a rich process that encourages participation without ever shouting or admonishing. Her work is always innovative. Ione's clear intention is to share her wisdom, her lineage if you will, in spacious manner that allows for each person's individuality to emerge and flourish.

Ione has a magical presence and she carries magic in more ways than one. Many years ago, in a healing circle that I led, we were working with manifestation and using objects and pictures which we had each collected that had personal symbolic significance . Ione had been absent when I suggested that we bring these things to the circle, but on the night we shared them, she said, as each person presented what they had gathered, Oh, I have that with me. I have that, too. And she removed from her capacious handbag pictures, crystals, drawings, ribbons. She just happened to have them all on her person, on a seemingly permanent basis. She was never without her magic, in that physical way as well as the metaphysical ways. 

This is a Dream, and Listening in Dreams, remind us that dreams are available to all: universal nectar. All humans dream; probably all creatures as well. Ione cites research confirming how many animals dream and that babies dream in the womb. I am certain that the planets dream. Dreams, she reminds us, open the door through which the soul beckons and we cross this threshold nightly and in daylight in the shifting glimpses of waking dreams that appear in the interstices of ordinary waking consciousness. 

Listening in Dreams cites a number of sources that focus on sound in dreams, but I found much of the material new to me, as I think it will be to many readers. In general, we are not taught a great deal about the importance of dreams and even less about the nature of sound and its intimate relationship to the meaning of dreams. Sound seems to partake of the timelessness of all dreams; it floats beyond barriers and may be perceived directly and distinctly as sound, or make itself known telepathically to the dreamer. This book describes processes that open dream experience and interpretation to include sound, to invite it and experiment with it. Listening in Dreams describes music