{"id":5139,"date":"2012-08-29T02:14:04","date_gmt":"2012-08-29T06:14:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/dreamgates\/?p=5139"},"modified":"2012-08-29T02:14:04","modified_gmt":"2012-08-29T06:14:04","slug":"give-me-a-straight-up-dream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2012\/08\/give-me-a-straight-up-dream.html","title":{"rendered":"Give me a straight-up dream"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Confused by your dreams? \u00a0You could try asking tonight for a straight-up dream.<\/p>\n

Let me explain. Some dreams take a lot of tending. We need to walk with them and around them for a while, letting different layers and possible meanings surface in their own time. We may need to get feedback from others who are active dreamers and know how to offer their associations in the right way. We can’t get our heads around certain dreams because they are experiences of a deeper reality.\u00a0We can’t fit experiences of the deeper reality into our heads; we need to get our heads into the deeper reality. One way to do that is to learn to travel – in a lucid, wide-awake shamanic journey – through the doorway of a remembered dream to enter a deeper space, have an adventure, and bring back gifts.<\/p>\n

All great stuff. But sometimes we’d like a dream that is a straight shot. And sometimes we are gifted with a dream that\u00a0requires no interpretation, no discussion, no rocks and no soda.<\/p>\n

In the Hawaiian language, such a dream is called a\u00a0\u201cstraight-up\u201d dream (moe pi\u2019i pololei<\/em>)\u00a0.\u00a0<\/em>The dream is clear. It may be a vision of things happening at a distance, or in the future, in a quite literal way. It may be an encounter with a god or spirit. There are no symbols to decipher, no deceptions, no analysis required. The straight-up dream is what it is.<\/p>\n

It may, of course, require action. If we don’t do something with our dreams, to bring their energy and guidance into our everyday world, we do not dream well. This is something traditional dreaming cultures understand.<\/p>\n

I love that Hawaiian term, straight-up dream, and enjoy using it in my classes and dream-sharing circles, where newbies will sometimes be temporarily befuddled, wondering if I am proposing an early cocktail.<\/p>\n

A note on the Hawaiian vocabulary of dreaming.\u00a0How much a culture understands of the practice <\/em>of dreaming is reflected in the variety and specificity of the terms it uses for different types of dream experience. The Hawaiian language contains an especially rich, and current, vocabulary for these things.<\/p>\n

A general word for “dream” in Hawaiian is moe\u2019uhane. <\/em>This may be translated as \u201csoul sleep\u201d but is better understood as \u201cnight experiences of the soul\u201d, since for traditional Hawaiians, dreaming is very much about traveling. <\/em>The soul makes excursions during sleep. It slips out of the regular body, often through the tear duct, described as the \u201csoul pit\u201d and travels in a \u201cbody of wind\u201d. During sleep the dreamer also receives visitations from gods (akua<\/em>) and ancestral guardian spirits (aumakua<\/em>) who may take the form of a bird or a fish or a plant.<\/p>\n

Like all practical dreamers, the Hawaiians recognize that there are big dreams and little dreams. You don\u2019t want to pay too much attention to a \u201cwild goatfish dream\u201d(moe weke pahulu<\/em>), which is caused by something you ate or how fast you ate it. The colorful term is derived from popular belief that eating the heads of goatfish \u2013 at other times a delicacy \u2013 in the wrong season, when bad winds are blowing, causes sickness and troubling but meaningless dreams. On the other hand, you want to recognize that a dream may contain the memory of a trip into the future that can give you information of the highest practical importance.<\/p>\n

There are \u201cwishing\u201d dreams (moemoea<\/em>) that show you something you are pining for, which may or may not be attainable in ordinary reality. There are \u201crevelations of the night\u201d (ho\u2019ike na ka po) <\/em>that carry the power of prophecy.<\/p>\n

A most interesting category of Hawaiian dreams are those \u2013 believed to be gifts of the guardian ancestral spirits \u2013 that are given to promote the healing of relations within a family or community. Dreams are also given by the aumakua <\/em>to promote personal healing.<\/p>\n

The Hawaiians pay special attention to visions that come on the cusp between sleep and waking (hihi\u2019o<\/em>) believing that these are especially likely to contain clear communication from the spirits and \u201cstraight up\u201d glimpses of things that will unfold.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Confused by your dreams? \u00a0You could try asking tonight for a straight-up dream. Let me explain. Some dreams take a lot of tending. We need to walk with them and around them for a while, letting different layers and possible meanings surface in their own time. We may need to get feedback from others who…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":224,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,78,10,24,5,2,20,7,22],"tags":[821,1460,819,820],"class_list":["post-5139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-active-dreaming","category-ancestral-traditions","category-conscious-dreaming","category-dream-interpretation","category-dreams","category-dreamwork","category-history-of-dreaming","category-lucid-dreaming","category-shamanic-dreaming","tag-aumakua","tag-body-of-wind","tag-hawaiian-dreaming","tag-moeuhane"],"yoast_head":"\nGive me a straight-up dream - Dream Gates<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2012\/08\/give-me-a-straight-up-dream.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Give me a straight-up dream - Dream Gates\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Confused by your dreams? \u00a0You could try asking tonight for a straight-up dream. 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He is the creator of Active Dreaming, an original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism. Born in Australia, he survived three near-death experiences in childhood. He leads popular seminars all over the world, including a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. A former lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University, he is a best-selling novelist, journalist and independent scholar. His nine books on dreaming, shamanism and imagination include Conscious Dreaming, Dreamways of the Iroquois, The Dreamer's Book of the Dead, The Three \"\"Only\"\" Things, The Secret History of Dreaming, Dreamgates, Active Dreaming and Dreaming the Soul Back Home: Shamanic Dreaming for Healing and Becoming Whole. His most recent book is The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse. Over the past 20 years, he has led seminars at the Esalen Institute, Kripalu, the Omega Institute, the New York Open Center, Bastyr University, John F. Kennedy University, Meriter Hospital, and many other centers and institutions. He has taught depth workshops in Active Dreaming in the UK, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Brazil and Austria and leads a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. He hosts the \"\"Way of the Dreamer\"\" radio show at www.healthylife.net. He has appeared on many TV and radio shows, ranging from Charlie Rose and the Today show to Coast to Coast and the Diane Rehm show on NPR. His articles on dreaming have been published in media ranging from Parade to Shaman's Drum.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.mossdreams.com"],"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/author\/rmoss"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/224"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5139"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5143,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5139\/revisions\/5143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}