Dream Circles

An Astrology-Plus Post

Article © 2013 by Joyce Mason
All Rights Reserved

A dream circle is a gathering of people who agree to listen to each other’s dreams in a safe environment and offer whatever feedback the dreamer wants.

Dream circles may consist of just a pair of people or several. I think they work best in small groups of no larger than six participants. I recommend that you convene your dream circle weekly at most, twice a month at minimum. Longer gaps in-between meetings make it difficult to maintain continuity in each other’s complex dream life. Think about how hard it is to find and follow the train of thoughts to make sense of your own dreams. Then take that effort times the number of people in your group.

The sustained effort to help the members of your dream circle grow in understanding about each other’s dreams is well worth it, but tackling this project for more than a half-dozen people on an ongoing basis risks drowning in the Sea of Subconscious. You'd have a too personal experience of the expression among astrologers, "Neptuned out."

In time, most people find they can wean themselves from this kind of group process, going to a former group member or friend who knows you and your dreams well for a second opinion, as needed. On the other hand, you might enjoy the group process and shared growth so much; you wouldn’t dream of leaving.

Anyone can start a dream circle, one of the easiest ways to find deep psycho-spiritual connection with like-minded people.

In either case, with time, you’ll become a whiz at panning for the gold of inner growth in your own night movies.

Guidelines

Sharing the content of each other’s dream life is a sacred trust. Dreams are an opening to a person’s soul. Accordingly, certain guidelines will help keep the circle safe and the members helping each other in the most positve way. Here are the guidelines that have worked for me when I’ve facilitated dreamwork groups:

1. Invite Trusted Friends Only into the Dream Circle. Highly personal information is exchanged through each other’s dreams. Invite only people you trust with this information to participate. Ask existing members to recommend only trusted friends as new members.

2. Keep Confidentiality. What happens in Dream Circle stays in Dream Circle. Regard your time together as having the seal of the confessional, for often it is confessional in nature.

3. Choose a Competent Facilitator. It’s good to have one person lead, getting things going at each session and doing the secretarial work to keep in contact. Consider a leader with experience in deciphering his or her own dream life. However, in dreamwork, everyone is equal. You could separate out the “secretary” functions and rotate facilitation among the group members. You can experiment with the length of time you’d like to stay with the same facilitator for continuity. Once you’re in sync with each other over a period of time, you may find that any one of you can lead without skipping a beat in the group's dreamwork-sharing rhythm.

Sometimes you can get dreamwork in a therapeutic setting, where the therapist is the expert. (Many psychologists and other helping professionals are trained in it). However, dreamwork is also a matter of spiritual growth. When approached from this angle, don’t expect it to be professional therapy. However, there is also great value in simply supporting each other’s personal and spiritual growth. You are the living expert on your own dreams. Like AA and many other self-help groups that focus on your relationship to a Higher Power, dreamwork can also be done as a peer-to-peer effort to improve your lives and relationship to Spirit.

4. Respect That the Dream Belongs to the Dreamer. While others may have ideas for the dreamer to consider, the only person who can get that gut-level feeling that an interpretation is right-on is the dreamer. We must never presume to know. Even if our thoughts don’t ring a bell with the dreamer, they may later on or provide a counterpoint for sorting. That is, others’ ideas may help the dreamer cross off on his or her mental list the things the dream doesn’t mean to him or her. Dreams are the spiritual experience of the dreamer. No exceptions, and keep strong boundaries on this point. Politely ask participants to leave the group, if they regularly attempt to force their ideas or interpretation on the other members.

5. Honor Time Constraints. Choose the amount of time you’ll meet in each session, say two hours. At the beginning, have each dreamer state whether he or she wants to share a dream at this particular session and the estimated time they'll need. Perhaps you can cover only two long dreams in one session. If you can’t get to everyone that night, quiz the circle on urgency. Who feels a need for guidance now, and who is OK with waiting till next session? The waiters can be first up next time. 

The dream world is timeless and formless. It’s the gauzy place of no boundaries ruled by Neptune and the flowing feelings of the Moon. This is where a good facilitator is golden to keep the members from drifting into tiring overtimes or the habit of over-serving some dreamers while not giving enough attention to others.

6. Do Your Dream Circle Your Way. Decide as a group how you want to run your dream circle, and revisit often how it’s working for everyone. Let your circle be a support system that considers everyone and the dynamics of change that take place as dreams stimulate personal transformation. 

7. Add an Astro-Spin. If the members of your group are conversant in astrology, bring your charts and look at how your dream content fits ongoing natal chart issues and current ones by transit. This Uranus-Neptune combo can be very powerful, a prescription for awakening the dreamer.

Breaking the Language Barrier

Dreams are a language unto their own. Don’t expect to learn a new language overnight. Immerse yourself in the culture of dreams, and you will learn better and faster! 

A dream circle is like a visit to Paris when you’re trying to learn French. You’ll get it by going there, where the language is spoken all around you, unlike my rusty high school French that had no real field testing. I can barely understand parlez-vous when it’s spoken to me, and if I ever had to construct a real French sentence, I’d pray it was one of the samples in my primer.

Pleasant Surprises

Dreamwork enhances intuition, for you are learning to work with symbols from the subconscious. I believe the act of bringing material regularly from the subconscious to waking consciousness is one of the strongest practices for increasing your own sensitivity and intuition or psychic skills. My closest friend and I even dream for each other!

You may find this pleasant side effect in your dream circle. Sometimes we are not open to see material in the same way our dream buddy will see it or report it. My dreammate and I have gotten a big kick out of  being each other’s mediums. Whenever a dream makes no sense, we have learned to check in with each other to see if it's hers or mine. If your dreams include your dream circle friends, there may be messages in your dream for them, too. Be sure to share them.

Dream on—and consider starting  a circle of sharing this powerful practice. Your dream circle will amplify all you’ll gain from doing your dreamwork.

~~~

Photo Credit: © Les Cunliffe - Fotolia.com

Keywords to Unlock Chiron – now available in PDF on the sidebar or at The Radical Virgo Store.  Learn the language of Chiron and how lingering pain and stumbling blocks are the catalysts to healing and weaving wholeness.

Dream Journals

An Astrology-Plus Post

 
Article © 2013 by Joyce Mason
All Rights Reserved

A

 dream journal is a record of a dialogue between you and your subconscious. By recording the dream transmission, you are transcribing the direct, unedited shorthand—the symbolic language of pictures used by your mind and spirit to convey concepts through your dreams. Then comes the Sort-It Detail—deciphering it.

It’s simple to understand that you can’t mull over the interpretation without a good record of the film and dialogue of your night movie. You need a way to hit the replay button to get the fine details and review the action. So, the only thing that we need to go over is how to keep a good dream journal.

Some people like to use a tape recorder. Most people write down their dreams, more conducive to review and analysis. The format is a matter of taste, but here is what I have learned over the years about helpful substance. 

What to Do At First 

It’s likely you’ll have to convince your dreams, in the beginning, that you’re serious about them and willing to be their scribe. Go to sleep with the intent to remember. Keep your pen, paper, and a book light handy to jot down major concepts if you wake up in the middle of the night. This will keep both you and your partner, if you have one, from glaring lights in the middle of the night. By keeping the lights focused on your journal, you’ll avoid completely waking up either of you.

Dreams are best remembered and transcribed in that hazy threshold between sleep and waking.

If you sleep through the night without a bathroom break (a good time to stop and ask yourself if you remember anything), record first thing in the morning. Don’t even get out of bed. Grab your notebook from the nightstand. As you get good at this and your dreams know you’re serious, you may be able to hang onto the story till you get your morning coffee, then go to your computer or notebook. Even a seasoned dream scribe will do best as close as possible to his or her dream state.

What to Write

The level of detail is completely up to you. As a Virgo, I love details. I think they provide a richer tapestry of information. But sometimes, you’ll only remember a snippet. Sometimes the shortest dreams are as rich as an éclair,   packed with everything you need to know. Don't ignore one of those short-but-sweet ones, thinking it was too tiny for your attention. It may be like a rare gem, small but valuable. The best rule of thumb is to write down whatever you remember. The mind is an amazing filter. It will just slough off what you don’t need to know and leave the rest for you to work and play with.

How to Organize It

I write my dreams in a simple format on my computer, then print out and prong them into a three-ring binder. (I can’t even read my own handwriting, so typing is a must.) This is what works for me. Any format that works for you is fine. Several of my friends buy beautiful journals with covers that have personal meaning and hand write in them. I suspect they channel their recall through their fingers.

Always date your dreams and file them to your taste, either in forward or reverse chronological order. (I like the latest one on top.) I do several other things I have found helpful:

• Give Your Dream a Title. I know it sounds a little over the top, but you’d be surprised how this capsule version of each dream will give you a mental and emotional cue, especially when you’re paging through a series of dreams over time to find any patterns. Titling often captures the main nugget of the dream and is your first step toward synthesis.

• Optional: TV Guide Blurb. This is another great technique, a little longer than a title. It nuggets the main action of the dream, as if you were reading the preview of a program in your local TV listings. (I'd insert it right after the title, as an “executive summary.” When you use this technique, it’s important not to personalize it. For example, if I dreamt about a menacing, large dog chasing me named Spot, I would not write Spot chased me, bent on attack. I’d write, instead, A woman is chased by a mad dog. Why is this important? Dreams are often symbolic. The dog could mean a problem or another person who is “dogging” you. It’s important not to get too literal, or the blurb might solidify your thoughts about the dream too early and eliminate important interpretations. Again, titles and blurbs are usually first steps toward synthesis. Occasionally, they are the dream in a nutshell. These are happy occasions for their elegance and simplicity and save your poor head from all that scratching.

• Record Your Thoughts About the Dream. While it’s still fresh, I write my unedited ideas about what I think it might mean. Of course, you can mull it over later, but again using the presumption that we are most in touch with intuitive and cosmic forces during the threshold time between sleep and waking, you will find most of your first ideas to be accurate.

• Make Affirmations to Redirect Any Fears or Negative Feelings Identified. For example in a recent dream, someone was holding me hostage by holding my car keys so I could not leave. The scene was in my own apartment. I felt it had to do with feeling frustrated about how long it’s taking me to get one of my books published. I had no control; someone else had the keys. I could not “go.” I wrote these affirmations: I hold the power to my success, and I move forward with total ease and comfort.

• What about Dream Dictionaries? Dream dictionaries are fine for dreamers to use, especially when you’re just getting started, as long as you don’t treat them like gospel. They often give the broadest, archetypal or universal meaning of a symbol. These are important to get to know. However, though dictionary will give you the symbol’s most generic meaning, it’s more likely that the dream is offering the symbol in a way that’s custom-fit for you. Therefore, it’s most important with practice to learn your specialized symbol system. Example: There was a love in my life that took me decades to get over, and I often had dreams of him set in San Diego, even though we met and spent time together in the Midwest. It took a long time before I deciphered that San Diego was a pun. Keene and I had met on a beach in our late teens, and San Diego meant “sandy ago.” My brain put him in the setting where we met but updated it to something more familiar to me now and more proximate to where I live currently.

Bringing material regularly from the subconscious to waking consciousness is one of the strongest practices for increasing your own sensitivity and intuition or psychic skills. These skills enhance problem-solving.

Dreams Are a Treasure

This is a lot of work. Like most treasures, dreams are something you have to dig for. Why is it worth it? 

First, dreams are a well of creativity, including the Mecca of creative problem solving. In one of my favorite books on the topic, the classic Higher Creativity: Liberating the Unconscious for Breakthrough Insights, authors Harmon Willis and Howard Rheingold talk about how the best solutions and creative insights happen when we are offline—sleeping, playing, puttering—dreaming. Another example of this is when you just can’t remember a name or some bit of information, and the harder you try, the harder it is to remember. When you just forget it, the answer bubbles up on its own, in its own good time.

Thinking will only take us so far. Dreaming and other right-brained activities have to do the rest. Both sides of our brains perform vital functions. Dreams are the life’s blood of artists, writers, and more left-brained human beings that need some right-brained balance in their lives. 

Second and equally important, dreams are a psychological sorting ground, a place where we can express fears and feelings in a safe place we cannot often conjure in daily life. You can dream of beating up your boss, but I hope you wouldn’t dare do it. You can exaggerate your feelings in your dreams by being naked, an expression of feeling very vulnerable and exposed. Hopefully, you don’t streak down Main Street as an expression of how badly you feel. Dreams are a safety valve like the steam release on an old-fashioned pressure cooker. 

A final important point, dreams have an interface with our most treasured goals, those dreams of another kind. When it comes to our most desired goals, there is a great parallel between night dreams and waking goal dreams. They both require us to have vision, to listen carefully to cosmic signs, and to trust the process. Soon you’ll learn that night dreams lead to viewing your entire life as a symbol system. When a real dog chases you, it might be that you’re running from something or someone who’s nipping at your heels, and you can hardly run fast enough to get away from it or them. Look at this waking incident with the same interpretive eye as if you'd dreamt it. 

May all your good dreams come true—and may all the others be a great catharsis!

~~~

Photo Credit: © Luisa Venturoli - Fotolia.com

Keywords to Unlock Chiron – now available in PDF on the sidebar or at The Radical Virgo Store.  Learn the language of Chiron and how lingering pain and stumbling blocks are the catalysts to healing and weaving wholeness.

Dreams Waking and Sleeping – A Primer

An Astrology-Plus Post

Article © 2013 by Joyce Mason
All Rights Reserved

July is dream month on The Radical Virgo! I’m migrating all my astrology and astrology-plus posts about complementary symbol systems to this blog while Writer-Astrologer Joyce Mason undergoes renovations. Astrology and astrology-plus will be housed on The Radical Virgo. My non-astrological writings will remain on joycemason.com. Sweet dreams!

I have been a dream catcher for as long as I can remember. After journaling my nightly entertainment and instruction for decades, I understand my own dream code. This is what it takes—writing it down and taking persistent shots at analyzing the content, until you see the patterns, rhyme and reason. Once you get the hang of your personalized symbols, the sky’s the limit on self-understanding.

Free guidance in your sleep. What could be more laid back? Effortless?

Even more enticing: This symbol system spills over into waking life. For instance, I got the message that it was time to look for my birth mom when the topic of adoption kept coming up in every other conversation and a magazine connecting adoptees and birth parents appeared in the window of my local bookstore. The one I passed every day and could not miss if I tried. A series of dreams about happy reunions complemented these waking hints, although the characters in the stories varied.

As you can see, the message I was supposed to “get” was a very simplified nugget of the material I was receiving. My world kept repeating “adoption, adoption” and my dreams whispered “happy reunions, happy reunions.” By not being hung-up on the details—by zeroing in on the simplest core message—my dreams came true, both sleeping and waking, in a happy reunion with Original Mom in 1986.

This reminds me of two of my favorite dreamwork techniques. One is to nugget your dream down to a single sentence, like a blurb in the TV Guide. Example from last night’s dream: Woman returns to her childhood home to find it renovated and moved to a different location.

I was the woman, but it’s better to take yourself out of the description, in case you or any other star is symbolic. Could be I represent someone else, as dreams are notorious for morphing one person into another and substituting one person for someone else with similar characteristics.

My childhood home represents security and happiness to me. My time in that little brick house were the best years of my life.

The blurb nuggets it down to a simple concept. The house can change in appearance or location, but I can still find what it represents in an uncertain world—stability.

The other technique I love is titling dreams. I took a workshop once where I learned this trick, and it has helped me vastly in dream synthesis—discovering the core message. It’s important to use your first inspiration in titles, as it is usually spot-on. I called my childhood home dream, Happy Childhood Home: Moved, Redone.

There are many other techniques I have developed over time, but the most important thing I want to share is that dreams are the portal to intuition and learning to use divine guidance toward abundant living. In order to mine your subconscious, you have to go down the shaft and hang out there—a lot. I know some people are scared of the dark, but remember that little light the miners wear on their heads to guide them on their way? Right on their third (intuitive) eye? It symbolizes insight, and the stuff they seek is treasure.

So, what if you’re somewhat new at all this? How do you get started?

If you don’t already remember your dreams, here’s a medical fact. You have them; you simply have not invited them into waking memory.

Here are some helpful dream memory tips:

• Get enough sleep. I dream triple the content on days I can get 8-9 hours.
• Avoid stimulants, especially caffeine, beyond morning
  
  
• Avoid alcohol at night
  
  
• Anything deeply relaxing before bedtime enhances—lavender baths, meditation, tense/release of muscles
  
  
• Pray about or affirm your desire to remember your dreams. You can even write a note to your Higher Power requesting guidance on a specific issue and put it under your pillow.
  
  
• Keep a note pad handy to jot down memories first thing upon waking, even in the middle of the night, along with a high intensity reading light that won’t bother your partner if you share a bed.
  
  
• Put the herb mugwort under your pillow, which you’re likely to find at your local health food store. The scent stimulates dreams.
  
  
• Use flower essences that evoke dreaming.

Dreams are so integral to the intuition and insight needed to have a cool life, no matter what your age; I encourage you to invite them into yours wholeheartedly. Dreams are like people. The more you court them and pay attention to them, the more they’ll want to hang out with you—and share themselves.

Revisit my Astrology and Dreams post from May 2010 to learn more about integrating these two symbol systems and to complete this set of posts by bringing it into the July Dream Month mix.

Finally, if you read this blog, you practice or are interested in astrology. With time, you’ll also start seeing how your dream symbols point to what’s happening in your chart. For instance, I had been dreaming a lot about genitals, especially male members. Freud would have had a field day with the content of my dreams. On the female side of gender anatomy, I dreamt I was bleeding way past menopause and profusely. That’s when I got the sense the message wasn’t sexual. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like my dreams were asking me to look at Mars in my chart. I was going through a period (no pun intended) of recovering from exhaustion, ergo the bleeding from a Mars-related part of my anatomy. I had been drained of all energetic resources/life’s blood. I couldn’t “get it up” when it came to energy. (OK, Freud, in that sense there was surely some penis envy.) I couldn’t activate my Mars for love or money. If only my Mars were at attention like the men in my dreams! (They seemed to be experiencing that four-hour plus problem they warn about in the Viagra commercials.) As you can see, dreams also have a sense of humor, apparently in keeping with their owners. (My Jupiter in Scorpio sure is evident in mine.)

For the fun of it, take your next set of repeated dream symbols and see what planet or sign they’re pointing to. What do you think they’re suggesting you do with a natal configuration or transit? 

I’ve had a theme going of cosmic hints to look at issues with my Mars for at least a year. Once I made that connection, I realized there was yet another aspect of Mars I needed to explore related to my vitality and how my natal trine between Jupiter and Mars symbolizes how easy it is for me to overdo and overstretch my energetic resources.

While dreams are the realm of the Moon and Neptune, they can “tune” you into any part of your chart and the subconscious content that’s waiting for your attention. I’d love to hear from you in the Comments about the dream-to-astrology interface—or your experience, in general, of working with your dreams.

~~~

Photo Credit: © deviantART - Fotolia.com

Keywords to Unlock Chiron – now available in PDF on the sidebar or at The Radical Virgo Store.  Learn the language of Chiron and how lingering pain and stumbling blocks are the catalysts to healing and weaving wholeness.

July: Dream Month on The Radical Virgo

More Astrology-Plus Posts

My website, Writer-Astrologer Joyce Mason, is undergoing renovations. Like summer roadwork in most places in the US, I’m moving some ramps and shoring up the infrastructure. The irresistible force is the need to make room for my novels and other writings not related to astrology. I’ve gotten crystal clear guidance that my novel, The Crystal Ball, is just the beginning of a bigger move in that direction. (If everything goes according to schedule, The Crystal Ball will be available this fall.)

The movable objects in the Reconstruction Zone are all my writings on my website related to astrology and other symbol systems such as tarot, dreamwork and flower essences. A number of articles on these topics have already been offered on The Radical Virgo. I’ll be migrating any remaining articles on these subjects, previously on JoyceMason.com, to The Radical Virgo.

In that spirit, July will be Dream Month here on the RV. Note that this blog has the same initials as recreational vehicles, and I certainly hope you’re still having fun—and that next month’s dreamwork festival will be both informative and amusing. I share some fairly bizarre dream examples. That ought to be good for a few laughs, even in your sleep. Have you ever woken up laughing from a dream? I did once. Very memorable and a nice way to start the day. Got my husband laughing, too.

Midsummer is the perfect time for dreaming. We get out in nature, camp out, and lie on our backs looking at the starry sky. We get into the mountains and fresh air that gives us terrific sleep and higher quality, more insightful dreams. In the US, it’s our country’s birthday on the 4^th of July. We celebrate the American Dream.

All in all, it seems like the right time for dreamwork, especially with almost all the outer planets retrograde, soon to be joined by Uranus to make it unanimous. Dreams lure us into some of the deepest inner work, the introspection so many retrograde planets ask of us.

I hope you enjoy both the waking and sleeping kind of dreams on our next Radical journey together.

~~~

Photo Credit: © Adpower99 - Dreamstime.com

Keywords to Unlock Chiron – now available in PDF on the sidebar or at The Radical Virgo Store.  Learn the language of Chiron and how lingering pain and stumbling blocks are the catalysts to healing and weaving wholeness.