This morning’s column was going to be an email to Chris McCleary, who operates the www.nationaldreamcenter.com site and who is working on his fourth or fifth Masters in dream-related work.
But, instead, I want to throw out a wild theory, or three – and get some feedback from you – to see what we can evolve on the coming art of Co-Dreaming.
There are two bits of important background to have before we delve into the concept – and then on to why we need crowd research on it.
The first point is that my novel DreamOver is based on some very personally “real” dream work I’ve experienced. Specifically, parts of my first novel are autobiographical.
The part where the fisherman or worker personality was wandering around what seemed like a marine hardware store in a former Soviet client state on the edge of huge lake or arm of the sea…that was objectively “real” to me because I dreamed that dream. So was the small child who dreamed about walking down out of the hills in South America, only to be chased through the edges of town by a group of bullies/toughs.
The title of that novel gets to the idea of dreaming-over and finding ourselves experiencing other people’s lives.
So, let’s set that concept aside for a moment.
Next to the second bit of data: I see my wife Elaine every once-in-a-while in dreams. But only as a glance. She’s doing one thing, and I’m doing another in the dreams. Seems that I’m also a passing apparition in hers, as well.
I look forward to sleep because it’s like going to I-Max – the dreams are that real and all encompassing. Not a sense is untouched.
In last night’s vivid dream, there were two major plots going.
One the plot involved a neighbor of mine who was just moving into our area. In my dreamland, Elaine and I have a modest (but still sprawling/large) home on a saltwater beach area.
In this dream, there was no fence between the neighbors house and ours (until we worked out our differences). He had a yapping dog as well as a miniature camel (about 5-feet high, two humps, who spits and tries to nip). We got the fence issue sorted out, though, and that would keep his Michael Jacksonian menagerie off our slice of heaven. Chain link in dreams…who’d have thought?
The second plot to the dream was there was evidence of a criminal being down in our boathouse. In our dream-home, there is a covered boathouse that zigzags out into the water, you see. There are six or eight slips that are covered – and out at the very end is our big family yacht. Nothing to pretentious: 110-feet four-engines and the finest interior ever.
But that’s not the point: A police officer showed up and said he’d like to check out our boathouse. There’d been a crime of some kind. So, being a cooperative fellow, I led him to the boathouse where there was a Coast Guard RIB boat standing by. The Coasties had spotted this partially submerged car in one of my slips.
The car was a curiosity: Bobbing slightly, it was a four door blue Hillman or Citroen 2CV-looking thing. Although it had a rear engine. Somehow (this is a dream, remember) the car was floating. It was kept afloat by air trapped in the large wheel wells and by the fact it was remarkably waterproof. Oh! The Engine of this floating car was also missing. The cop and the Coasties were not sure how the hell that happened. And I was wondering what this car had to do with what was supposed to be my dream…
I was with someone who was there are a different matter (off-camera guide, perhaps) but we had been down to the big yacht earlier and there was no blue floating Hillman/Citroen and that meant (in the dream) that the floating car had been placed there sometime after our jaunt to the big boat which would have placed things around 3:30 to 4:30 in the afternoon. (It was another perfect day in Dream Land…filtered sun, 75, or so. Elaine was doing something up in the house while this was going on, etc..)
Hell of a backgrounder, huh?
At last, we’re to the interesting bit of speculation and why we need some crowd research done.
I awoke from this dream with a burning question: Why aren’t Elaine and I spending more time together in these dreams of mine?
And this leads directly to the matter of what I call “Co-Dreaming.”
The idea of co-dreaming is very simple: You have someone who is your “soul-mate” and you go into dreams that are cooperative in nature.
I’ve already “dropped in” on enough other personalities that accessing those in a dream state seems possible. And I’ve had enough of those real woo-woo moments that I know with absolute, unshakable, unquestioning belief that there is real knowledge transferred around in the dream state.
But, as we’ve noted in past commentary, it’s not every dream, every night, or any of that. Proper dreaming requires the right vitamins, health, personal energy levels, quiet in the emotional background of the dreamer…and who knows what else.
Then you need to do a fair bit of dreaming. That includes things like learning to intend in dreams. It goes without saying that we each have a super-power or two in dreams. They turned out, in my experience, to be a little stranger than I’d been expecting.
For example, personal flying: In order to do it there are two or three major “deal points.” First, it doesn’t work as an experiential dream with me if there are more than one or two heart-level-connected people around. In other words, flying in dreams is not something that can be done in front of large crowds or, interestingly, as an exercise of ego.
When you fly in dreams, there is also a kind of buzzing in your chest and one other thing (I don’t want to ruin your dream work by telling you my experiences…).