The essential nature of dreams

As a young human, I dreamed vividly, and much of my waking life was threaded through with daydreaming. I think that’s an important part of that stage of life. Having the time to wonder and imagine, while trying to figure out who you are and where you are going is really important. We know creative play is a vital  part of child development and I think it’s still very necessary as people try to figure themselves out in their teens. I’m not convinced there’s any point in a human life when dreaming of what might be isn’t relevant.

The younger you are, the easier it is to imagine possibilities. The more privilege you have, the more scope there is for change, adventure and novelty. If we don’t have hope, it’s really difficult to dare to want things, or to imagine things being different. Without being able to do that, we won’t have the means to change things. Humans tend to need to imagine things before we try and enact them. Crush the imaginative capacity out of us and it is more likely we will stay as we are and go along with whatever is done to us.

I don’t dream much when I’m depressed. I go into a sort of survival mode where I can only bear to think about escape. Rather than playing with ideas of what could be, sometimes I want to hide in safe places that never were and never will be. There is comfort in this, but it doesn’t usually allow me to sort anything out. When I’m depressed I most need to be able to imagine what could change to help me, and I’m least able to do it at that point. I suspect this is fairly normal. 

There’s a lot wrong in the world right now, and dreams are such wispy, ephemeral things. It may seem like madness to invest in dreaming as the climate collapses and societies are pushed to the brink. Even so, I think it may be our best hope. If we can dream of something better, we stand some chance of creating it.

Not being in control

There are all sorts of Pagan and otherwise spiritual activities that focus on being in control of something. There are strong associations in many traditions between being spiritual and being disciplined. Often what religious practices are for, is taking us away from our basic animal urges towards something more elevated.

How does this work with Paganism? Does it make any kind of sense to try and discipline ourselves away from our animal selves? We are animals, mammals – is it even possible for a human to do something that isn’t a reflection of our animal nature?

Perhaps part of this stems from the mistaken ideas we’ve had about what animals are and how they exist. We have a considerable history of reducing animals to meat machines that do everything unthinkingly, by instinct or by conditioning. This clearly isn’t true. There is so much evidence out there to demonstrate that mammals are thinking, feeling creatures and that we all have a lot in common on that score. 

Most mammals spend a lot of time resting. Humans often describe that in ways that assume laziness, or sensual indulgence. What we project onto animals has so much to do with wanting to feel superior to them. What we imagine when we see them not actively doing something, is that they are doing nothing. We don’t assume that a cat gazing into space is contemplating philosophy, or deeply involved in some spiritual practice. Just because we have to write books and read books and talk to each other a lot and try very hard to develop prayer and meditation practices doesn’t make it special. Maybe we aren’t superior for having figured this out, maybe we’re inferior because cats just crack on and do it anyway without needing the paperwork.

Being in control is itself often an illusion. We only think we are in control because we don’t understand the influences affecting us. We don’t realise what we’ve unconsciously absorbed, and which stories we are playing out, all too often. We like to feel busy and as though we are being productive and making progress. The more in control we appear to be, the more progress we feel like we’ve made.

I see this come up a lot with how people approach dreaming in a spiritual context. The value placed on controlling dreams bothers me a lot. It feels to me like a process of cutting down a vibrant ecosystem and replacing it with things we’ve planted in straight lines. That’s not progress. It is control and it takes away far more than it gives.

I think of dreaming as being a wild landscape. There is more to gain from entering that wild landscape without wanting to control it, I think. There’s a lot to be said for looking at anything humans have come up with and asking whether it is designed to try and take us away from our human, animal selves. Existence is not something to overcome, it’s something to embrace.

I have a dreaming book that isn’t about controlling things, more over here – https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/moon-books/our-books/pagan-dreaming 

Messages from Dreams

The house I grew up in has always featured heavily in my dreams. In my teens, those dreams tended to involve me trying to escape from the house. Often the dream would end with me jumping out of a window.

In my twenties, having moved out I would dream that I was back in the house. I wouldn’t be able to remember where I now lived, or how to get there. I might escape the house, but then I would just be running, sometimes chased. At that point in my life my dreaming had reduced to a handful of anxiety nightmares. I wasn’t living in a good situation and it took me a long time to admit that, and to get out.

There weren’t so many house dreams in my thirties, and my dreaming became much more diverse and involved. I became as likely to dream about my grandmother’s house as I was about the parental home. The level of menace reduced.

I’m now seeing a new pattern. I am back in my childhood home. I leave of my own free will – not through windows or to run away. I go out through the back garden and into the field beyond. What exactly is beyond the field, varies. In real life there is woodland. Mostly in my dreams there are people, and otherworlds and adventures that have no connection to my childhood or my lived experiences. 

Those house dreams have always had a lot to tell me about myself. I didn’t always want to listen to what they had to say. The dream dictionary I had as a child said that when you dream about houses you are dreaming about yourself. I detest dream dictionaries. That house isn’t me. That house is about my past, my childhood, my sense of belonging. I haven’t found a house that could be me, although sometimes in dreams I go house hunting, and that feels like a really hopeful thing to be doing.

Some years ago I wrote a whole book about dreams and dream interpretation – you can find that over here – https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/moon-books/our-books/pagan-dreaming

Pagan Dreaming

I’ve written a number of Pagan and Druid books, and of the ones published by Moon Books, Pagan Dreaming has been by far the least successful. It’s been out for years and has just broken through 500 sales. For perspective, the average book sells 3000 copies in its lifetime. Most of publishing does not look anything like those multi-million selling famous authors. For every massive international hit, there are many, many books that don’t even sell a hundred copies. 

Part of the problem is that there are a lot of dream books out there, it’s a really saturated corner of the market. Most dream books are either dictionaries of meaning, or are focused on teaching you how to control your dreams, and these are not things I’m interested in. Much of the motivation for writing the book came from wanting to offer alternatives to the x=y approach to dream symbolism, and the idea that control is the goal.

The trouble with publishing is the assumption that people want more of what they already have. It’s perhaps less of an issue in Pagan publishing because it’s still a new area and we haven’t established hard rules in the way some genres have. Long may it continue so. As a reader I am not even slightly interested in reading books that are just like some other books I’ve read. I want to be surprised. I want something different. This is one of the reasons I read a lot of books from indy authors and small publishing houses. 

Of course I’m not alone in this. Netflix are proving over and over that there is an audience for films and series that are not exactly like everything else. Books that are unusual can and do sell too.

The trouble is, that books, films, etc are all easier to sell if you can go ‘if you liked that other thing you’re going to love this.’ I’ve worked in marketing.  There’s an obvious attraction to things that you can easily see how to pitch and who to pitch to. But that doesn’t get you the best books, or the most original books or the books that could actually sell the most. If no one has done it before, you have no idea if this is the book everyone is waiting for. It could be. It might not be.

Some authors are amazing and brilliant, timely and trendsetting and deserve every success. Some authors are successful because they’re really good at figuring out what people want from them and how to pitch it. Some authors are simply lucky, and catch the zeitgeist in some way. Some authors keep churning out the same thing and get enough marketing support and sell far more copies than perhaps they deserve to. It’s not a meritocracy. 

I prefer to take risks, write things that interest me and hope for the best. I’ve tried to be commercially oriented, and frankly I don’t do that well. There are enough people who like what I do for it to feel worth doing. That’s enough. 

If you’re the sort of person who is interested in your dream life, but also heartily sick of dream dictionaries and you don’t see lucid dreaming as the goal of your dream life… I may have a book for you and you can find out more about it over here… https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/moon-books/our-books/pagan-dreaming

Going to Granny’s House

It’s a theme that crops up in my writing, in poetry and fiction and here on the blog. Granny’s house in the woods, place of magic and transformation. It is both the house of Red Riding Hood’s grandmother and also Baba Yaga’s house, because I’ve seen them as the same for many years now.

I also go to my grandmother’s house when I dream. My maternal grandmother died more than a decade ago, and I haven’t been into that house since then. Five generations of my family have slept under that roof, so it feels a bit odd that now the house is home to people I don’t know.  As a teenager, I slept there. It was complicated for me – there was a lot I loved about both the house and my grandmother. But I was mostly considered a nuisance and living between two houses where I wasn’t much wanted.

When I dream about the house I lived in as a child, I only ever dream about trying to leave. For many years, this was one of a handful of anxiety dreams I had, and I dreamed of little outside those few recurring nightmares.

Dreams of my grandmother’s house are a bit more complicated. Often she is there, and I think this is part of my still working through the grief of not being wanted. We had quite a few rows in my last year or so there, because she didn’t really want me there – or at least gave that impression. With hindsight, I was an easy person to vent pain and frustration on, and maybe she didn’t believe I was serious about going. I don’t know. There are questions I never asked, and I remain a bit haunted by not knowing if she maybe cared for me more than I thought at the time. In recent years, a number of her friends have made a point of telling me how well my grandmother thought of me and how pleased she’d be with what I’m doing. I hope so.

I note that I only take the people I am closest to into dreams of my grandmother’s house. Without exception, these are people who have no knowledge of or, in my son’s case no real memory of the place. These are people I can only ever tell about that part of my life. I think there’s something in me that would dearly like to take them back and show them. I don’t know what any of that would look like to someone else.

Last night I took someone I love to my grandmother’s house, and I kissed them. In the dream, my grandmother was not there, and I knew she wasn’t there in a way that is different from other dreams. I don’t know if that means she won’t be coming back, or that I won’t be going back to the house. Something has changed. Perhaps it is simply that at this point in my life, the people who love me are larger and more significant presences than the people who did not love me in the way I needed when I was growing up.

Changing how I sleep

Back when I wrote Pagan Dreaming, I speculated how interesting it would be if we could all just sleep when we feel like it. Sleep is one of those basic, essential human activities, but most of us are sleep deprived.  Capitalist industrial clock time makes a lot of demands on what we get to do when. At the time of writing about sleep, I had a child in school and was tied to clock time.

Here I am in lockdown, with a teenage son who can take responsibility for himself. Like a lot of people, the distress caused by the virus pushed me straight into insomnia early on. Rather than fight what this did to my sleep patterns, I went with it. I’ve been getting up when unable to sleep, and sleeping when I can and the result is a glorious hot mess in which I no longer have any kind of discernible pattern.

I am never going back!

I’ve never much liked routine anyway, so the less predictable sleep pattern is giving me a different shape to each day as I encounter it, and I’m enjoying that. Sometimes I have to make an effort to stay awake for things I’ve agreed to, but there aren’t many of them and I’m getting the hang of fitting the naps in. I go walking in the night, I see the dawn up, I get my much needed outside time when there are no people in it. This has done wonders for my wellbeing.

Some nights I sleep in two hour bursts, getting up each time to stretch and do whatever makes sense. It’s fine. Some night I sleep straight out for seven or eight hours. Sometimes it’s only four or five and I make the rest up in naps. On the whole I get a better quality of sleep for doing this. I spend more time in dream sleep – naps are often full of dreams. I feel better. I no longer suffer from insomnia, I just have times when I am awake and times when I am asleep. Insomnia is really only a problem if you can’t get on with being awake when you’re awake, and can’t sleep when you’re able to.

It all feels a bit wild and revolutionary. It definitely feels like stepping out of capitalist models of living and being. It feels free, and natural. I just go with what my body wants and lo and behold, that works.

Dreaming your full time Pagan Life

What we do is informed by what we dream. That’s true of our daydreaming, and or our less intentioned night dreaming. What we absorb resurfaces in our desires to shape our intentions and our actions. Magic is all about will, but will is informed by many things we might not be aware of. Take a step back from your intent to check where it comes from and what’s feeding it.

Make time to dream your Pagan life. This is especially important if you can’t meditate or don’t have time for a daily Pagan practice. Make time – whatever time you can – to just sit down and daydream. I recommend a plant or a good window view or a nice outdoors setting for company if you can. Failing that, some Pagan art, your oracle cards, a crystal – anything that gives you a bit of Pagan-flavoured headspace. Imagine what it would be like to live a totally Pagan life.

What would you eat? What would you wear? What would your sleeping arrangements be like? What would your job be? How would you pay your bills? How would you get around? What would your family life be like? What would you do in your time off? And how would your spiritual practice fit in to all of this?

If you work with guides, gods or any other spiritual forces, you can invite them in on this process. Ask for guidance. Ask for inspiration. Keep doing it in whatever moments you can find and see what emerges. Find out what you really want from a full time Pagan life. Explore it imaginatively. Play with ideas – your first impulse is not necessarily your best one, you may need to dig in a bit.

Now, here’s the fun bit. There’s no direct action stage here. Just keep dreaming. Except that all our ideas are born of dreams and imaginings, and that what we invest energy in shapes us. You may feel moved to run out and make radical changes – feel free, it’s your life. You may not feel able to, you may not be able to see how to get to your dreams from where you are now. But, as you go along, your dream infused life will change, because you will make small, every day choices based on those dreams. The odds are it won’t be the dramatic shifts that really count in the long run – it will be the small, every day things that change everything. It usually is.

Dream who you want to be. Dream the life you want. Dream how best to manifest your Paganism in your life. I don’t particularly believe that like attracts like, or that what we focus on, we get. But I do know that what we think about colours every experience. How we think shapes our perceptions. What we focus on, we invest in. So often, things we are not conscious of get the steering wheel in our minds and lives – it’s the expectation of this that underpins every single advert you encounter. Take back your dreaming. Change everything.

Where do dreams come from?

Whether we’re talking about what happens when we sleep, or what happens when we daydream, dreams are significantly informed by our every day experiences. What we’re exposed to gets in. This means what is around us in our immediate environment. People we spend time with. Stuff we do. Things we watch. Books we read. It all goes in. From it we weave the often irrational seeming dreams we have at night, and we also create our ideals, hopes, aspirations and desires.

It’s worth pausing now and then to see what is coming in and where it comes from. What are you feeding your mind with? How much of that is advertising designed to sell products? How much of it normalises western consumer culture? How many of your daydreams come from what your society encourages you to want – fame, fortune, the fast car, the white carpet in the immaculate living room, the exotic holiday…?

Are you dreaming, and daydreaming as a Pagan? If you look at the imagery of your dreams, you’ll find the answer soon enough. If you can see your Paganism in your night time dreaming, it’s a good indicator that you are living it while awake. That doesn’t have to mean deities and mythic content – in my case it means that my dreams are full of landscape. Often when we analyse dreams, the temptation is to try and find meanings in specific symbols. However, it can be well worth looking at dreams over time, to pick up trends. The overall shape of your dreaming over a period of weeks or months can tell you a lot about what’s influencing you. A dream diary can be a good way of exploring this.

We’re being sold commercial dreams designed to lock us into patterns of work, consumerism and frantic, carbon guzzling leisure pursuits. These advertising-induced dreams keep us working, struggling, getting into debt, running after things we can’t have, and destroying our home and habitat as we go along. Reclaiming our dreams is part of how we change this. Taking back control of our longing and desire, and taking back control of what feeds our unconscious dreaming gives us a lot more options.

Perhaps one of the key things here, is how we handle instant gratification. Often, instant gratification – in the buy now pay later mode – is offered as a bad thing. But, life is now. It’s not next year, or when you retire. The dreams we are encouraged to aspire to are so often set just out of reach. When we get the promotion, the pay rise, or some other distant thing happens, then we can have the stuff we really want. The simpler our desires are, the easier it is to gratify them. An afternoon pottering in the garden, a night out dancing, a meal with friends – these are things you can have quickly. These are the kinds of things a good life is made of. If we’re always working towards some big dream, we may never get round to being happy in the moment, satisfied with what we have, or able to enjoy life.

Your dreams – especially your night dreaming, are in some ways very natural. That doesn’t mean dreams are immune from human influence. Dreams are made of what we absorb. Dreams can tell us a lot about what we expose ourselves to and what effect that has on us. Question your dreams and make sure they really are yours, and not someone else’s marketing strategy.

More about dreaming in my book, Pagan Dreaming, available from most places that sell books…  https://www.bookdepository.com/Pagan-Dreaming/9781785350900

Dreaming differently

What would happen if our dreams were not driven by the desire to consume? What if we weren’t drawing our inspiration from adverts, and weren’t being fed a constant consumerist narrative about what we need to own in order to be happy? What would we daydream about then?

We might stop dreaming about new cars and kitchens and carpets and start dreaming about how to live at our hearth and in our homes. Dreams of community and time spent with people we care for, and who care for us. Not the look of the kitchen itself, but the scope to make good food and share it with good people. Life changes dramatically when you’re less focused on how a home might look and more concerned with what you can do in it.

Equally, if our gardens don’t have to look like something off the telly, we might dream of wildlife havens instead. We might plant trees and welcome insects, birds and small mammals to share the space with us. We might dream of the summer humming of bees and the beauty of butterflies. We might want a space to just chill out and watch the clouds go by – dreaming of a space in which to dream.

We might indeed dream of holidays, but not of planes and other countries. We might dream of having the time to really get to know the land we live on, or having more time for the people who come into our homes or the wild things in our gardens.

We might dream of changing our bodies, but not through the misery and seldom successful methods of commercial dieting, and not by purchasing a new look from the planet trashing fashion industry. We might dream of the things we can joyfully do with our bodies. We might aspire not to thinness or fashion, but to grace and delight. We might start listening to our bodies and let our dreams come from the needs our bodies have.

Rather than dreaming of fame and fortune, we could dream instead of the things we want to achieve. The book we want to write – not to be famous, but to say the things we need to say. The art we want to make. The dance styles we want to learn. The courses we want to study. The things we want to create with our hands. We can make space to dream up ways of re-using rather than throwing away. We can get excited about our own creativity.

We can dream about how good it would feel to know we are living sustainably. The pleasure of not harming the living planet, and of knowing we’ll leave it in good shape for those who come after us. We can dream of a world in which life and beauty flourish, rather than profit and greed. And the more we dream this, the more we move towards it. The more we share these dreams and draw other people into them, the more feasible it all becomes. Dream it and talk about it, and see who you can co-dream with, and then see what you can co-create as those dreams turn into ever more viable possibilities.

(And I can recommend the Transition Towns movement as an excellent place to find inspiration and turn dreams into action – https://transitionnetwork.org/ )

Dreaming reality

Everything human-made has been dreamed up by someone. Our cultures, societies, communities, urban spaces, our farming and our treatment of the landscape is all a consequence of someone’s dreaming. Sometimes we dream together and deliberately. Sometimes we dream many different things and what we get is a messy hotchpotch that isn’t quite what anyone wanted.

Our dreaming is not a neutral process. What we dream of, we may invest in, purchase, or vote for. The person or company that can offer us the things we dream of will be especially attractive to us. Giving people their dreams is tricky for anyone who is not a fairy godmother. It is simpler to persuade people to dream of certain things so that you already have the solutions in a warehouse ready to sell to them.

However, we can also dream of changing things. We can dream of planting trees and living in a low carbon economy. We can dream of social justice – as many people have for many hundreds of years. When the dream of social justice becomes more appealing than the dream of having power over others, there will be social justice. When dreams of compassion become more widespread than dreams of greed and ownership, compassion will become normal and greed will become rare. Everything we do starts with ideas, and those ideas can seed in us, barely noticed even as they are part of what shapes humanity’s relationship with the living Earth.

We make the human aspects of our world out of our dreams. We start with ideas, and we build and change in line with them. We get caught up in the dreams of others. Nothing that humans do or make is inevitable. There were always multitudinous other options we could have taken. Unfortunately we have habits of telling our history stories in ways that help us believe there was no other way. There was always another way. There were always people dreaming differently and imagining something else – good dreams and nightmares alike.

Climate change exists because of our dreams of having lots of energy to use. We dream of travelling quickly from one place to another, quickly replacing throwaway fashion to be up to date. We dream of easy food in simple containers, we dream of brands and buy their plastic bottles. We do not dream of the sea when we throw our rubbish into watercourses. We dream of holidays in the sun, and so we embrace air travel. To change our collective behaviour we have to change our individual dreams and our ideas about what to value and aspire to.

When you get down to it, dreams are powerful, but they’re also incredibly ephemeral. Of all the things we might try to change, they may be the easiest to tackle, and some of the most effective. What we imagine has the power to change our lives. It costs nothing to imagine differently. It requires little effort. It may not even require much persuasion.

There will be more thoughts around how we do this in the next week or so.