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Dream Gates

When I was last in London, I walked down a quiet road off Kensington High Street where I once lived and noticed that there is now a blue plaque marking the apartment building opposite my former home as a place where the poet T.S.Eliot once had a flat. This took me back to even older…

One of the most important gifts of our dreams is that they put us in touch with more aspects of ourselves than we have recognized in what Yeats called our “daily trivial minds.” Among these aspects is the famous Shadow, composed of parts of our selves we have repressed or denied (and tend to project…

“Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company,” counseled Mark Twain. I’ve quoted this more than once in front of church audiences, when I have judged them genial enough to take it in good heart, or in need of genial-izing. It’s an example of the type of one-liner Mark Twain called a…

I often read a page or two of Emerson before greeting the sun. For me, he is the wisest of American philosophers and the most practical, because his words create a stir in the spirit that is a wonderful incitement to action. He is the perennial enemy of hand-me-down systems of belief and self-limiting notions…

Why seven? I’ve been asked this question about the ancient Iroquois precept that we must be mindful of the consequences of our actions down to the seventh generation beyond ourselves. I don’t recall ever hearing an explanation from my friends of the Six Nations, or seeing one amongst the earliest records of the traditions of…

At the Omega Institute near Rhinebeck, New York, where I’m leading a five-day adventure in Active Dreaming this week, a striking assemblage of metal figures stands on the grass beside the library. You look through the hollow in each to the last, and smallest, figure, which contains an unborn child. This sculpture set was created…

When I meet someone new, I like to ask them if they know what their name means. This is a way of registering the new person’s name in my mind, so it doesn’t slip. It’s also a great conversation starter. I find it interesting that lots of people, even at the midpoint of life or…

When analysts and “dream experts” take dreams seriously, they usually approach them from just one perspective, as sets of symbols to be decoded. Certainly our dream life is rich in symbols. Etymologically, a symbol is something that “brings things together” (what is “diabolical”, by contrast, is what divides and separates).  Symbols help bring together our…

Happy news: science continues the slow process of catching up to what active dreamers already know about the gifts of dreaming. At the recent convention of the American Psychological Association in San Diego, presenters suggested that dreaming may improve memory, enhance creativity, and help us prepare better for future events. San Diego psychiatry professor Sara…

  Memory is mother to the muses, and in my playshop on the Healing Power of Story in Maryland over the weekend we found, again and again, that the best stories sprang from life memories, often from early childhood. One participant held us spellbound as she recalled how, when she was very small, she would…
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