I suggested, gently, that this situation was likely to change, in the midst of the fused energies of a circle of active dreamers. I also observed that an “old” dream that still evokes strong emotions can be the portal for an adventure in shamanic lucid dreaming that can lead to very interesting discoveries. I explained a core technique in my Active Dreaming approach that would be central to this training. We would ask each participant to provide the portal for a group journey centered on their personal intentions for healing and soul recovery. 

The next day, Eva sat with a small group and offered them her childhood dream from nearly three decades before, the last dream she said she remembered. “In my dream,a hand reaches from behind a curtain and offers me chocolate. I have always loved chocolate, but I was terrified of the disembodied hand. I woke screaming, and promised myself that ever afterwards I wouldn’t dream.”

Bravely, Eva now made it her intention to go back inside that dream and find out who was behind the curtain. Her partners, or trackers, would accompany her in this exercise in wide-awake dreaming, fueled and focused by my shamanic drumming.

At the end of the drumming, Eva was jubilant, and astonished. She went behind the curtain and found that the person who had been offering her a sweet treat was a man she had loved like a father in her early childhood. He had been a good friend of her father. Unlike her father, who had never displayed affection and often seemed entirely disinterested in her, this family friend had told her stories, often centered on characters and objects in the toy shop he owned.

During Eva’s dream reentry, he appeared “like an angel”, glowing and bright. He apologized for having frightened her in the dream of long ago, He had been killed in a car accident shortly before the dream. His face had been horribly mutilated and he had not wanted to frighten little Eva by appearing to her as he looked after the crash. So he had veiled his face with the curtain.

When Eva told me the dream, I remarked, “Now you are a dreamer again. I bet you are going to dream up a storm tonight.”

The next morning, she greeted me at breakfast with a happy shout. “My dreams were racing all night like a TGV” she reported. A TGV is a Train à Grande Vitesse, a high-speed train. “As each dream rushed through me, I felt I was regaining a vital part of me, something that was left behind until now.”

We talked about her father. She told me he was now 82 and was terrified of death but wouldn’t talk about it. “Maybe you’ll find your father reaches out to you now. Maybe he’ll even start telling you his dreams. They could help prepare him for the journey that lies ahead.”

At the end of that morning, Eva chased me along a stone path. “I have news!” she cried out happily. “At 11:58, my father phoned me. This is the first time he has ever phones me in his entire life.“

Right after the workshop, Eva texted an update. Now her father was asking her about dreams.

An old dream, like an old broken gate in a drystone wall, can be a portal to realms of magic, healing and deep soul connection.