Our dreams contain the universal challenges and experiences that unite us, regardless of our differences in beliefs or culture.
Our initial Vibrant Planet Dream-In revealed that participants need deeper education on how to access and share creative states of consciousness. Most people are unaware of the techniques to intentionally engage their nighttime dreaming minds for specific purposes, such as problem solving, physical healing, having visionary experiences and much more. In the Dreaming Together How-To Guide below, learn the skills to ‘incubate’ your nighttime dreams, have big dreams and collectively dream with others from around the world.
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The vibrant transformation that humanity is being called to do collectively, is the same transformation that each of us are being called to do individually. In other words, if you want to contribute to our vibrant future, perhaps focus first on cultivating your own personal vibrancy and natural gifts. The planet needs you to shine now more than ever!
At times our crisis may feel insurmountable, especially given all the dire outlooks and divisiveness so prevalent in today’s mainstream media. What the media is not considering are the game-changing solutions that will arise when sufficient numbers of us unite together for the greater good. Until that time, we need to believe that the best of human nature will rise up, and that we will fully embrace this opportunity to collectively evolve. Having a positive view during crisis doesn’t mean dismissing or spiritually bypassing unwanted feelings of fear, despair, grief or loss. It’s during those trying times that we are drawn together for our shared betterment and healing. Your unwanted feelings often are simply calling you to connect or contribute to the greater good, which by definition includes your own individual good.
“When you heal the planet, you heal yourself.
When you heal yourself, you heal the planet.
Because everything is connected.”
~ Teyuna Mamo (Indigenous Columbian spiritual elder)
Within the human body, nature brilliantly evolved a symphony of interdependent biological systems, organs and micro-organisms. You can trust that your inner nature knows how to orchestrate your physical healing. You can also trust that your dreaming mind can orchestrate the healing and transformation of your psyche. The goal is to collaborate with your dreaming mind, and thereby unleashing the full transformative potential of your nighttime dreams and imagination.
Collaborating with your dreaming mind often involves relaxing your need to control experiences and outcomes based on what you think needs to happen. This can be challenging because of the mind’s tendency to cling to existing habits and beliefs. Although control has its place, inner collaboration happens when you allow multiple aspects of your psyche and biology to freely participate in your consciousness. So, instead of trying to figure things out with your thoughts, simply hold an intention or a receptive space within you for new experiences and inspirations to emerge. One of the best ways to do this is by incubating your dream-time.
Dream Incubation is a thought technique practiced since ancient times. A dream incubation starts with an intention, typically a request or question that you pose to your inner-self just prior to falling asleep. While asleep, your dreaming mind directly responds to the intention by immersing you in a corresponding dream experience. Incubation is highly effective and easy to do. Simply write down your intention and then repeat it in your mind as you fall asleep.
As a western practice, incubation began inside Egyptian Serapeums, temples where dreamers invoked a god to receive physical healing and other profound experiences. This practice continued in Greece’s popular Asclepeions, which were dream healing temples akin to modern-day hospitals. Today, incubation is widely used for many purposes by dream therapy practitioners, group facilitators, consciousness researchers, do-it-yourself dreamers and others.
It makes sense for ancient people to have invoked a healing god while they slept. Our bodies have an innate god-like ability to orchestrate physical healing and wellness, especially while we sleep (articles 1, 2, 3, 4). If you have any doubts, just try to go without sleep for a while. Aspects of your physiology that are ignored or inactive while awake, activate during sleep and contribute to shaping your dream experience. Additionally, your memories, emotions, and core beliefs can integrate simultaneously into your dream. This complex nonlinear synthesis inside the dreaming mind helps explain why peoples’ waking minds often have difficulty interpreting the meaning of dreams. An incubated dream can be more easily interpreted because it is a direct response to the intention that you incubated. Even more importantly, incubation opens a channel for collaborative dialog between your waking mind and your dreaming mind.
The most effective intentions to incubate are the ones that deeply move you. Is there a healing, transformation, insight or experience that you truly want to have? Your dreaming mind will light up when tasked with going beyond the limitations that keep you from living the life that your soul truly wants.
Pursuing your soul’s yearnings through incubation is an ongoing process that deepens based on new personal insights, feedback from dreams and daily experiences. To help you gain mastery in the art of dream incubation, DreamSpace has compiled a simple half-page PDF: Steps for Incubating & Recalling Dreams.
Remember, an intention works best when you deeply care about it. Those of us who care deeply about the planet’s future, share the same intention for planetary transformation, which we can collectively incubate during DreamSpace’s global Dream-Ins. Incubating with a big intention, and for the greater good, is also one of the keys to having big dreams.
Most of us can recall experiencing one or more big dreams that were fundamentally more moving and memorable than the typical dream. These highly captivating experiences have a distinct vividness and intensity to them. “They burst across the threshold of waking awareness and seize conscious attention, imprinting themselves so deeply into memory they can be clearly recalled weeks, months, or even years later.” – Kelly Bulkeley, Big Dreams.
We can all experience big dreams if we devote some time and energy to it. This can begin by simply closing your eyes and meditating upon that which you really want to transform in yourself or the world. Notice when any strong feelings arise, be they negative or positive. If you’re not really feeling anything, perhaps you need to go with a bigger transformation. Going bigger often means setting aside your thinking about what is plausible for you, so that you are able to imagine a more sweeping transformation. If you engage your imagination enough, it will automatically engage the brilliance of your dreaming mind. Author Kelly Bulkeley explains:
The brain that spends the day engaged in future-oriented thought is also the brain that sleeps at night and remains engaged in many of those same cognitive processes, preoccupied by the same concerns and challenges of waking life. The difference is that in sleep the brain has greater powers of neuroplasticity, an extended range of cognitive creativity, wider associative networks, less executive control, and looser constraints on what can and cannot be thought.
Sometimes big dreams involve experiences where you face seemingly unsolvable problems and challenges. These experiences can have a strong shadow or unwanted component that needs to be faced for a transformation to occur. Joseph Campbell spoke of it as the hero’s journey.
Treasuring the gift in the shadow will give you the courage to explore it, and there’s often no safer space than your nighttime dreams to explore and evolve your gift. All heroic journeys through shadow and light are a type of dialectic: a dialog between two opposites. Some other examples of dialectics include: doubt-confidence, fear-courage, injury-healing, and loss-love. The opposites in a dialectic are inseparable, since they are one and the same dynamic or theme.
Often one half of the dialectic will feel unwanted, while its opposite half is wanted. When presented with experiences that feel unwanted, remember that your dreaming tends to go to the dialectic that needs the most immediate attention in order for a key personal transformation to proceed. If you habitually resist this transformation, it may show up in a recurring dream or build into a nightmare that really grabs your attention. The dreaming is encouraging you to gain mastery of the dialectic in the safety of your dream-time, so that you can more fully unleash your creativity and bring your soul’s gifts to life.
In a big dream, you may experience the complete mastery of a dialectic that culminates in a remarkable breakthrough, or a spiritual experience that transcends the duality of the dialectic. The path to dialectical mastery can be revealed through an ongoing dialog with your dreaming mind. This happens over multiple nights as you create new incubation intentions based on feedback from the previous nights’ dreams. Ask yourself what kind of big transformation is your previous dreaming calling forth, and then incubate for that transformation. If you do not know what’s being called forth, you can always ask to be shown in your dream-time.
Our planetary crisis calls for a new kind of dreaming. We now must dream together with each other and the earth. By doing so we will evolve the collaborative consciousness necessary for solving the wide-spread challenges we face. This points to why the Vibrant Planet global Dream-In events are so essential.
To understand how collaborative planetary dreaming works, it’s helpful to view consciousness as something that occurs universally, beyond the confines of the human mind. The doctrine of Panpsychism, that everything is conscious, continues to gain acceptance among many reputable philosophers, neuroscientists and physicists. (articles 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). From Scientific American – Spacetime Emergence, Panpsychism and the Nature of Consciousness:
Panpsychism holds that even the smallest layers of reality have experience. Fundamental particles have minute levels of consciousness, and in a watered-down sense, they are subjects of experience. When particles are in extremely sophisticated configurations, such as when they are in nervous systems, more sophisticated forms of consciousness arise.
What will be the next level of sophisticated consciousness to arise on our planet? Some think it will be an artificial intelligence arising from machines. Perhaps a vastly more interconnected kind of planetary consciousness is already naturally arising on earth. Our current existential threat to life on earth may be the exact catalyst necessary for the evolution of a collaborative planetary consciousness.
You might have a difficult time imagining what this consciousness would be like, and rightfully so. How can a single neuron imagine the dream experience that arises from its collaboration within an immense network of other neurons? If you were the neuron, you would feel lit up as electricity passes through you and gives you a sense of contributing to a higher purpose. In the same way, when you are contributing to the next level of planetary consciousness, perhaps you’ll know because your soul will light up with big dreams. Or perhaps we will all share in the same profound experience during dream-time, an experience that will forever change us. Our endeavor to dream together is a grand experiment, worthy of conducting because the results may truly transform the world.
During Vibrant Planet Dream-Ins, we open to receiving guidance from the intelligent force within nature that unfolds all creation. Some prefer to think of it as Universal Consciousness, God, Divine Presence, Creator, etc. Invoking creation’s greater meta-intelligence increases the likelihood of participants receiving big dreams that are numinous – spiritual or supernatural. Our aim with numinous dreaming is not to fixate on the form that a creator or a creation takes, but rather to hold a receptive dream space for the brilliance of nature to miraculously evolve through us as individuals and as a collective.
A numinous evolution in human consciousness is more likely to occur when we believe that something world-changing will arise by virtue of us dreaming together. This strong belief in and of itself can incubate our dream-time, and at very least point us in the right direction for the profound transformation that we want. Rather than having blind faith, we should rest assured that miracles are what nature does, and that by collaborating with nature, we become powerful beyond measure.
In modern western society, dreaming is mostly treated as an insignificant afterthought to our busy lives. So it’s not surprising that many people have an apathetic or adversarial relationship with dreaming. A cooperative relationship is possible when dreams are treated as opportunities for you to transform and bring your gifts to life. Sometimes your dreams might reveal a limiting emotional pattern that’s holding you back. Other times they will show you an unrealized capacity or superpower within you that wants to be acknowledged and developed. Think of dreams as your soul’s nighttime curriculum for improving your life. This way your dreaming becomes an ally in creating the vibrant life that you truly want.
It’s all about shifting your perception of dreaming from being a non-reality to being the very means through which significant transformations manifest in the real-world.
The dreaming is able to manifest transformations because it understands your inner nature, and the creative capacity of any collaborative environment that you’re involved in. For instance, when participating in a dream group, your dreams will integrate new growth opportunities enabled by the presence and abilities of specific participants. Your dreams will also integrate the creative capacity of the whole group as one collaborative consciousness. Imagine what your dreams will manifest when empowered by the immeasurable brilliance of a global dream community.
The Vibrant Planet dream community is dreaming into life a thriving new era for our planet. Joining the community is free, and the majority of your participation is so easy that you can do it in your sleep – during one of our global Dream-In events. A Dream-in begins by watching a compelling video that provides a shared intention and instructions for incubating our dream-time. After dreaming, those who wish can share their experiences online, or they can comment on others and weave dreams together into shared themes, stories and visions for our future. During the Dream-In you may have a dream that seems only focused on your own personal transformation. However, it’s likely that others will empathize and benefit from your dream, because it archetypically captures a fundamental growth opportunity within the human condition.
Bringing dreaming to life is about much more than just exploring the meaning of each other’s dreams. We use dreams as source material to inspire an ongoing co-creative process. This process engages our imaginations in combining separate dreams into a shared dream, which can be expressed through a captivating cinematic movie. Each movie in turn will provide the community with new content for incubating subsequent Dream-Ins. Our goal here is to support a roundtrip process for merging the creativity of our waking and dreaming states, enabling us to awaken together within our dreams and to dream together while awake.
Cinema helps to merge our creative states because moving images and sounds re-create the felt experience of being in a dream. Also, both movies and dreams immerse us in compelling storylines, which involve an arc of transformation amidst corresponding challenges and dialectics. The key difference being that instead of taking months writing a story, the scriptwriter of our dreaming mind writes it instantaneously and effortlessly while we sleep. The dream-time scriptwriter inside many of us will truly activate when invited to contribute to a movie that captures a transformative vision for our future.
A shared vision for our vibrant future needs to arise organically from like-hearted people and the planet. DreamSpace is developing the tools for people to collaboratively engage their limitless creativity and then share it in a compelling vision that inspires further global participation. Along the way, participants inevitably will have big dreams that they really want to share, like “I rode on the back of a whale in my dream! Check me out in the latest epic movie on VibrantPlanet.com.” We believe that our community-based dream cinema will catch on in a very big way.
Earlier in human evolution, we gained the ability to control and exploit nature. This ability to dominate nature has led to a planetary crisis that calls us to collaborate with nature on a whole new level. It all begins inside you. Collaborating with the innate intelligence in your body and dreaming mind, increases your vibrancy and creative capacity. Then you become more capable of contributing to the world and to our Vibrant Planet dream community, where we intentionally engage nature’s brilliance to guide us in bringing a vibrant future to life.
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