Psi Dreaming
Montague Ullman: Discussant
IASD (International Association for the Study of Dreams)
2007 Psiber Dreaming Online Conference
The last decade of the last century was known as the decade of consciousness. By that term the reference was to waking consciousness. The Journal of Consciousness Studies was launched. As far as I can recall, no article appeared devoted to the form of consciousness or unconsciousness that shaped our dreams. When the term consciousness was used it referred to waking consciousness. Things changed a bit at the turn of this century but the essential focus remained waking consciousness. With the appearance of the IASD things began to change. Bill Stimson, a friend and colleague, started a newsletter devoted to dreams in the seventies. Under the guidance of Roberta Ossana it morphed into the Journal of Dreams and Myth. Only with the turn of this century and with the creation of the IASD did dreams begin to come into their own.

The paper Judy Gardiner has presented is a contribution that has broadened the search for an open-ended and deeper understanding of dreams. It represents a unique dream series which addresses the interconnection of the spiritual, scientific and personal aspects of dreaming. The essence of Judy’s paper is that dreaming consciousness arises out of a much broader matrix than the unconscious that Freud wrote about and even the collective unconscious of Jung. She is working with a much larger canvas using colors that derive from both the world of science and the world of spirit. She came to these conclusions from the way her dream life extended beyond the truth of her own personal unconscious domain to both an ecological and a cosmic domain hinting at the unity of matter and spirit. Although she received a stream of scientific data dealing with sciences outside of ecology, her immediate attention was turned to geology and focused on ecology because of the poor condition of Mother Earth. There were two domains beyond the personal – namely the world of science and the reality of spirit. There was no line of demarcation between the personal and the transpersonal until her awareness of a theme had emerged. Once she understood that scientific metaphors were guiding her toward a higher truth, it was easier for her to differentiate between the two domains.

As she notes, she became aware of two distinct modes of dream content. One was the usual: dreams capturing feelings, dreams dealing with still unresolved issues in her life, the ordinary content of dreams – and dreams that go beyond the personal and touch on the scientific and spiritual domains. Two distinct styles of dreaming: the dream in its personal healing function and the other oriented to a transpersonal domain. The former opens the opportunity to personal growth; the other, ecologically oriented to events going beyond the personal such as nature’s destructive happenings. The former calls attention to personal issues. The latter addresses environmental issues that include but go beyond the personal.

Judy is introducing something new to the range of dreaming consciousness, something akin to an early psi warning system such that other mammals possess before a natural disaster occurs.

Dreaming consciousness is not only a unique warning system to the individual dreamer. It is also a built-in protective device relating to the welfare of the species. Awake we focus on ourselves. Asleep and dreaming we are concerned with ourselves as members of a unified species.

In summary, our dreams not only foster emotional growth for ourselves but also for our existence as a distinct species. Nature sometimes has tricks up her sleeve and one of those is that our dreams not only work for ourselves as individuals but also as a species.

Sometimes it does it through dreams that foster emotional growth. Healthy emotions connect us to each other. Unhealthy emotions separate us. In bringing the ecological, the personal and the transpersonal together as features of dreaming consciousness, our dreams put us back in the classroom where we have so much to learn about ourselves and the world we have helped to create.






Home  |  Sitemap

Cosmic Dreaming: Circling the Cosmos on a Dream  | The Nature of Cosmic Dreams | Key Features of Cosmic Dreams
Kaleidoscopic Vision | Psi Dreaming | Dream/Psi Entanglement

index sitemap advanced
search engine by freefind

Copyright © 2011
Cosmic Dreaming Updated: 09/05/19

Terms and Conditions