Besides You, Who's in Your Head (Heart, Soul)?

Dreamcrafting is an excellent practice for getting in touch (or staying in touch) with what-all is going on in one's own heart, soul and mind. It opens the way for us to peer into the parts of ourselves that are only too often lost amongst the daily clatter and clutter of our waking hours -- or, even worse, driven so deeply into our unconscious that it's difficult to scry out even when we go looking. When my then-girlfriend gave me a copy of Robert Moss' Conscious Dreaming in 2001 (she herself had just finished it), I decided to start keeping a dream journal. Here's the dream I had that night -- the first dream I wrote into my journal.

"Colony / Free Agents" (April 14, 2001)

I'm being followed around inside my own head by 2 guys who are "free agents" -- they're not a part of my psyche. They have a small studio apartment in my brain where they live when they're not working. Their job is to study my mind and figure out what parts are suitable for colonization by outside entities and/or ideas. If a given part of my mind is not suitable for colonization, they can recondition it to make it habitable by things that are not me. They've been doing this work for a long time -- so much so that until I meet them in this dream, I had no idea they were there.


Well...in the dream, the 2 fellows were not overtly sinister, although as they explained their jobs to me it made me uneasy, of course. I immediately began thinking of advertising and how it attempts to condition us to desire certain products or services, or to feel insecure about our body image and so forth. As I learned more about dreamworking, I undertook the practice of dream re-entry -- using shamanic drumming to bring on a relaxed state similar to dreaming while in a waking state -- so as to go back into this dream, hunt down those 2 working stiffs, and give them the boot. Keeping our mental and energetic boundaries whole is tricky enough without meddlers working to sabotage us from the inside out!

As I said above, active dreaming is an effective way of peering into ourselves to ascertain what exactly is going on in ourselves, and this dream is an excellent example. I spent a fair amount of time over the Summer of '01 delving into the deep parts of my heart, soul and mind to locate and root out "foreign objects" or all sorts -- self-limiting beliefs, old bits of emotional shrapnel bequeathed to me by various people from my past, and so forth. This included a harrowing piece of work to remove an energetic "worm" that was wrapped around my heart-center (not my physical heart, but the place in me that is the wellspring of compassionate thought and feeling) in August '01. That dual-purpose work was both a healing endeavor for myself and my initiation as someone that was to help others do similar healing work. People began to come out of the woodwork (old girlfriends, co-workers) looking for help in doing some piece of healing work for themselves -- most without necessarily knowing why exactly it was me to whom they were turning. Once this pattern became clear to me, I then began to seek out a few others I had wronged, so as to make amends if they'd let me.

So after five months of keeping a dream journal and delving into what the dreaming what leading me to, I was getting back into touch with parts of myself I'd been neglecting or entirely forgotten. At the end of the Summer I had the following dream:


"Power Up!" September 1, 2001

A techie-type employee and I are hanging in the void overlooking a large energy-grid-type network. There are hundreds of cables, some fat, some skinny. They run power to various areas in my psyche -- this is explicit, although we don't discuss it as such. My techie has finished a big job of rewiring various parts of Me, terminating old/useless/redundant/counterproductive feeds and adding new feeds designed to serve my life purpose better. We're admiring his handiwork as he explains how it all functions.


This was a very affirming dream, letting me know I was on the right track and doing important soul-work -- for my own benefit and the benefit of others around me. Not to mention it spurred me to keep on keeping on. After all, what good is juice if you don't put it to use? And when the world shook and changed ten days later, my dreaming got even deeper and more intense. But I was "powered up" and ready.