In the appendix, we’ll study documents from a possible future in which a Commonwealth of Dreamers has emerged, guided by priestess-scientists who are applying the gifts of dreaming to mend our world.
The child’s psyche is of infinite extent and incalculable age.
— CARL JUNG, “The Development of Personality”
To understand dreams and reclaim the practice of imagination, we must look to the master teachers: our inner children and the children around us. When very young, children know how to go to magic kingdoms without paying for tickets, because they are at home in the imagination and live close to their dreams. When she was four years old, my daughter Sophie had adventures in a special place called Teddy Bear Land, where she met a special friend. I loved hearing about these travels and encouraged her to make drawings and spin further stories from them.
One day Sophie sat down beside me and asked with great earnestness, “Daddy, would you like to know how I get to Teddy Bear Land?”
“I’d love to.”
“Sometimes I take the Sun Gate. Sometimes I take the Moon Gate. Sometimes I take the Tree Gate. Sometimes I take the Rainbow Bridge. And sometimes I just punch a hole in the world.”
I’ve never heard anyone say it better. To live the larger life, we need to punch a hole in the world. This is what dreaming — whether we are sleeping or waking or hyperawake — is really all about. On our roads to adulthood, we sometimes forget how to do it, just as older children in the Chronicles of Narnia cease to be able to see Aslan as they approach adolescence and become more and more burdened by the reality definitions of the grown-ups around them.
When we listen, truly listen, to very young children, we start to remember that the distance between us and the magic kingdoms is no wider than the edge of a sleep mask. True listening requires us to pay attention. To attend, according to its root meaning in the Latin, is to stretch ourselves, which requires us to expand our vocabulary of understanding. We owe nothing less to the young children in our lives. When we do this, we discover that they can be our very best teachers of how to dream and what dreaming can be.
What to Do When You’re Eaten by a T-Rex
“I was eaten by T-Rex.” Brian, aged seven, is rocking in his seat with excitement, but his voice is very soft. The fifteen kids in the circle, plus parents and grandparents, lean forward to hear him. We’ve gathered to spend a half day together at a local retreat center for a playshop I love to lead called Dreaming with Children and Families.
“Did T-Rex swallow you in one gulp?” Brian’s grandmother asks, making a gurgling in her throat as she mimics something very big taking a big gulp. “Or did he kind of munch on you?”
“It was a big gulp.” Brian’s eyes are gleaming with excitement. “Then I was falling down, down into T-Rex’s belly. I found two eggs. I cut them open and there were two baby T-Rexes inside. They came out and they killed the big T-Rex and I was fine.”
“How did you feel?” I ask.
“Grrreat!”
You don’t analyze a dream like this, whatever the age of the dreamer — at least not until you do something to grab the vital energy of the dream and embody it and bring it through to the present. This isn’t hard with Brian’s dream. We have a room full of excited kids, and kids are naturals for dream theater.
“Hey, Brian, would you like to playact your dream?”
Brian can’t wait. He chooses the two youngest children in the group, an angelic four-year-old named Abby who has just created a picture of one of her own dreams with crayons and sketch paper — a picture of a wild thing she has given her own name — and a toddler who has proved a virtuoso with maracas and other noisemakers from our communal music box.
“Aunt” Carol, our host at the retreat center and a gifted counselor and dream teacher, is picked to play the snapping head of T-Rex, a tricky role since she can’t stop beaming and laughing. There are plenty of dreamers, kids of all ages, to make up the body and tail of the beast. Soon the monster we’ve made is roaring and thumping around the room. Brian, playing himself, darts around, trying to hide behind the furniture; his fate is preordained. He is swallowed by T-Rex. He rolls over and over, playacting his descent into the belly of the beast. Way down deep inside, he finds the eggs and frees the baby monsters, who return the favor by saving him.
This is wild and happy and just-so, and everybody wants more.
We turn other kids’ dreams into theater, and each time a new strategy emerges for dealing with dream monsters. A ten-year-old girl tells us a dream in which she’s at school, on her way to lunch, when a “short monster” appears and starts eating her classmates. “He couldn’t eat me, because I kicked him in the face.”
Playacting that one produces a stampede as a very small boy, thrilled to be playing the short monster, pursues the dreamer’s classmates until he is laid flat by a pretend kick to his face. Everyone laughs as the dreamer dabs at the slime the short monster has left on her foot.
A thirteen-year-old girl in the group is menaced in her dream by people behaving like monsters. She puts on bat wings and flies off to a special place where she can be safe. The scariest adults in the dream are the ones who remain strangely frozen, as if they have been encased in blocks of ice, while she tries to avoid the attackers. In a later scene, she is at a wild ocean. When she plunges in, she becomes a killer whale and swims with delight with an orca friend who comes to join her. When she shape-shifts back into the form of a teenage girl, the grown-ups are no longer a threat to her. She has brought power back from the place of the killer whales.
THESE ARE SCENES FROM A SINGLE AFTERNOON of dreaming with kids and their families, the way our ancestors used to do it and some indigenous peoples still do. We had started out right, by drumming and making cheerful music to call up the dreams that wanted to play with us. Then everyone grabbed art supplies from the center of the circle to make a drawing of a dream.
Also at the center of the room, we had placed a huge toy box full of stuffed animals and puppets and plastic lizards. I invited the kids to grab any animal they liked. Then, since we were on traditional Mohawk Indian land, I had them join hands and voices in singing a simple Mohawk song that calls in the Bear — and with it, all of the other animals — as helpers and protectors.
Don’t cry, little one.
Don’t cry, little one.
The Bear is coming to dance for you.
The Bear is coming to dance for you.
We discussed how, if you have a scary dream, it’s good to know you have a friend who can help you out and take care of you. Little Abby came over to me and whispered confidentially, “I have a bear. And I have lots of dream friends.”
We broke every half hour for snacks of orange slices and chocolate chip cookies.
Toward the end, I opened my dream journal to a page where I had drawn a picture of Champie — the cousin of the Loch