The third day they walked us to a place and marked off a long rectangle, about seventy-five paces long and thirty paces wide. We worked to clean it, picking out all the rocks, pebbles, branches, and sticks until, in the late afternoon, it was perfectly smooth, as if it had been raked. Then, they prepared us, stripping us bare of outer coverings and painting our skin with lines and symbols of the energy of the land and being. Finally, in this space, they made a fire and performed ceremonies and let us join them.
In the sacred space, we celebrated the comings and goings of the human way, of yearning for a partner and finding one. In this space that had been swept clean and made separate, with our daily face and clothing exchanged, we reached down with our dancing to the center of the earth for something deeper, to connect to the Great Mystery. We celebrated the now and the beginning, the always so and the becoming of it.
That night I looked up and found Scorpio again, and watched him in his crawl across the sky. I watched and saw where he was when the moon rose, and again when the moon was high. I watched where he was as I began to get hungry, and when the first bird started to sing just before dawn. I lifted my gaze to the vertical and knew he did this before me, and would do it long after I turned to dust. And I celebrated it.
Through all of that week in the desert, between the sacred sites and the ceremonies, between the eating and the cleaning of it, the women sang. They sang, they painted, and they wove beautiful baskets. Their songs and their creating was the thread that wove the tapestry, binding together the singular events. Their baskets were woven from grasses on the land. Their paintings told the stories of it. Their songs were their conversation, among each other, and with the land and the Universe beyond it. They were the stories of the land and of their experiencing of it. They were songs of the memories and of the now. They were the songs of their dreaming.
Each of us lives two landscapes. One is the linear reality. This is the causal, expected march through life that usually follows a path of being born, growing up and going to school, getting a job, finding a partner, maybe having children, retiring, and then dying. It moves rather one-dimensionally on a flat line of A to Z. It follows social conventions, and often parental expectations. It offers few choices. And, just as we wondered when things were going to get started with the elder women in the outback, living in the linear reality is to have a feeling of always waiting for something to begin. But there is also the vertical reality.
The vertical reality is the inner landscape. It is our deepest place, wherein all of the mysteries of the Self originate. It is the place of God. It is the place of our dreams. Because the vertical reality is born from a dreaming place, it leaps and jumps, presenting synchronicities, possibilities, choices, even future events, and many other playful expressions of creative living. It is not linear, and it is often not expected. It is alive and purposeful, and leads us to wholeness.
As a dreamer, the duality between these two landscapes—the linear and the vertical realities—are erased. Living as a dreamer, life itself becomes a dream—the inner begins to mirror the outer, and the outer becomes a reflection of the inner. No longer a one-dimensional trudge, life as a dreamer springs into being, becoming multi-dimensional, vibrant, and creative; choice is ever present and we are led to a deeper and deeper unfolding of our true Selves. When we open our eyes to this landscape, we realize “it” has been happening all along—there is no more waiting, because life becomes truly lived.
My entire life’s trajectory has been drawn by my quest to understand my dreams. I have lived my life as a dreamer, beginning with a question prompted by my first ever remembered dream at age three, through to my life today where I teach dreaming to people around the world. The dreaming I teach is a specific lineage I was called to by my dreams, and it is through my dreams that I was led to my dreaming teacher. My dreaming teacher is Dr. Catherine Shainberg, and it is she who brought me to the desert to dream with the Aboriginal women.
The dreaming lineage taught to me by Catherine is a Kabbalistic practice and part of a long lineage that continues through Catherine from her teacher, Madame Colette Aboulker-Muscat. Colette was a renowned Kabbalist from Jerusalem, and the lineage traces back on both her maternal and paternal side through an ancient line of Sephardic Kabbalists that includes Rabbi Isaac the Blind of Provence (the first recorded medieval Kabbalist) and Rabbi Jacob ben Sheshet of the Gerona circle of Kabbalists. It is an ancient lineage and the most ancient form of Kabbalah, whose practices of the visionary process were recorded as far back as the first century.
Unlike other Kabbalistic methods, Colette’s work is pure Kabbalah (Kabbalah means receiving)—the receiving one does when looking within. It is the Kabbalah of Light. Colette brought these ancient methods forward to teach them to people from around the world. Catherine has further developed these methods and continues to teach them today, as she has now taught me to do.
Meeting my dreaming teacher, Catherine, was a significant signpost in my life’s landscape. I studied intensely with her for eight years one-on-one, in formal classes, workshops, and in casual together moments—in every moment she teaches. I spent hours fastidiously doing imagery homework she would prescribe. I took up her challenges of creating a dream group, thinking about how this work could directly apply to the world of business and to creative professionals, and at her word I went to school to earn my Ph.D. in psychology.
My relationship with Catherine is completely unique and difficult to put into words. It is the very special relationship of master to student, and such a relationship is too unique to be compared to any other, and far greater and richer than description allows. Catherine’s generosity toward my development extends beyond naming and description, and I will spend lifetimes expressing my gratitude for it. With her I learned what real love actually is. She is my True Teacher and my spiritual mother. It is to her that I dedicate this book.
This book is organized into two parts. “Part I: Experiencing Dreaming” details experiences from my personal life as a dreamer.
Just as the Aboriginal women led us through the landscape of their dream world, I will lead you through my dreaming landscape, pointing out signposts and markers, telling you their origins and their unfoldings, their beginnings and their now. I come from a family of dreamers, and begin with two chapters from my childhood describing the dream teachings of my father and my grandmother. Chapters three through seven detail my adult experiences with dreaming, where I was nudged ever forward on my path to find my dreaming teacher and finally become the teacher of dreaming I am today.
By walking with me through my dreaming landscape, you will see how dreams have mapped my life experience and what living as a true dreamer in the vertical reality looks like. As you take this walk, you may remember moments of your own dreaming story, and discover significant signposts of your inner unfolding that have been waiting to be recognized and responded to. In “Part II” of the book, I give exercises to prompt this reminding and help you develop your dreaming dialogue.
“Part II: Learning the Dreaming Language” is a guide to understanding your own dreams. In this section I will teach you how to open your dreams using a specific method that can be done by yourself and with a group. I will give examples of these openings, as well as a guide for forming a dream group of your own. In addition, you will learn specific imagery exercises to help you map your own inner landscape and begin to live a vibrant life of authentic Selfhood in the infinite possibilities of the vertical reality.
But first, this story begins in another middle-of-nowhere place, in a small town in the remote, far north of the Texas Panhandle.
Chapter One:
My Father: Five Foundational Lessons on Dreaming
In his