WORKING WITH OUR DREAMS

Another possibility is to devise a medicine bag for help during dreaming. Using obsidian crystals to help ground your actual self is one possibility for an ingredient. Mugwort is also used to stimulate lucid dreaming. Sleep with the medicine bag under your pillow.

Whenever you awake, immediately write down (briefly) what you have dreamed. You can also use a tape recorder. Then, the next day, you can write up your dreamtime experiences using those notes as the basis for your writing. The notes should bring back the images to your conscious mind.

Within the dream, try to learn how to actively control what you are doing. For example, I have a fairly substantial fear of heights. I also have a tendency to do a lot of flying in my dreams-hence a bit of a conflict. In my dreams I trained myself to start flying up only a little bit at first, so I wouldn't be too scared. Gradually, the height was increased until I was aable to fly above the level of telephone lines. From there on there was virtually no limit to my flying. In various dreams I have done some fairly fancy maneuvers, and flown fairly far distances. This is called lucid dreaming, and you might want to get a book on the subject and do some extensive reading.

Why should you do this? The reason is that, if something happens in the dreams that seems to be significant to you, you will want to be able to pay close attention to the event, prolong the event if possible, and take an active intereaction with the event. There might be some form of guardian being that appears, for example, and you would wish to talk with the being for a while rather than rushing off as in so many other dreams to some other series of events.

Keep a dream journal of your dreams. Look for repeating patterns of symbols, ideas, people, music, colors, words and the like. You may find that many of your dreams revolve around certain themes.

In your conscious time you may wish to image the dream (and change the ending if it was not what you wanted). You can also consult the Medicine Cards, the Sacred Path Cards, the Native American Tarot Deck, or other decks and/or books for insight. If you have a lot of excess time you can cross-reference your dreams to your biothythm chart. It is better to have too much information to work with at first, and then to distill that information into usable bits, rather than to make conclusions based on inadequate information.