Dream Gates

Adelita Chirino is an artist, video producer and jewelry designer who has taken my training for teachers of Active Dreaming. Over many years, she has volunteered to help inner city kids in Bridgeport and New Haven, Connecticut, through expressive art programs in which she has incorporated Active Dreaming techniques. I had the pleasure of participating…

In myth and legend, the raven is many things: trickster and creator, messenger and seer, personification of ravening greed, harbinger of death, companion or form of the Goddess. Here I want to speak about raven as an oracle bird, one that can lend us his or her sight. Odin sees far with the help of…

For many years after my divorce from my first wife, I found myself still with her in dreams, in situations that might have unfolded had we stayed married. My dream self aged at exactly the same rate as my waking self, and the circumstances of these dreams were entirely realistic.  Similarly, for years after leaving…

A great blue heron flew parallel to me, for more than a mile, as I drove to the Connecticut shore to lead an adventure in exploring the multidimensional self over the past week. This felt like a promise that our work would be deep and rich – and on the right track – as indeed…

The Guide can take many forms, in dreams and on the roads of waking life. Our true spiritual teachers often use shock or humor in their efforts to wake us up to the real nature of things, and they love to play dress-up. An earnest woman in a church group once asked me, at the…

One of my favorite games in my workshops is the Index Card Oracle. I get everyone in the circle to write something – a summary of a dream, an incident from memory, a reflection or a favorite quote – one one side of a 3×5 index card, as legibly as possible. We gather the cards…

What’s going on in your dream houses? I find that (to spin a famous Bible text) in my dream house, there are many mansions – extra stories and hidden rooms and basements, and wings of possibility. The state of a dream house may reflect the state of the body. If the dream house is in…

Working to complete my new book – which is on Active Dreaming as a way of conscious living – amidst a constant round of travel and teaching all over the map, I have become a stranger to clock time apart from the schedules of flight departures and workshop sessions. When fatigued, I throw myself down…

At one of my lectures, an earnest fellow asked me to “bottom-line it” for him; what is my approach all about? Remember to play, I told him. He wrote this down carefully, which suggested that he may not have gotten the message. I might have said, Don’t pass up any chance to fool around with…

Carpe diem, goes the old Latin tag. “Seize the day.” My personal mantra is no less proactive, but more conscious: choose the day. By my observation, what we encounter on any day has a great deal to do with what we bring to that day. We draw or repel different events and encounters according to…

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