Elaine and I were in San Francisco yesterday. No, not the San Francisco of everyday waking hours, but the one in my “dream world.” That inner world where every once in a while I get a glimpse of the future (like the day before the Gulf Oil disaster, where I dreamed of murder, oil, and a place called “the wall”) and where almost all of my dreams are played out.
You may have such a place, too. A kind of inner world which serves as a background against which many of your dreams are played out.
As you might be aware, one of my part-time projects is the National Dream Center (www.nationaldreamcenter.com) where people post their dreams about coming events. Not only are some of the dreams pretty darned interesting, but it provides a way to track the relative frequency of dream types.
The idea is loosely borrowed from Chet Snow’s book Mass Dreams of the Future
since I have had enough personal experience with dreams being ‘real’ that I wanted to provide a place where ‘future dreams’ and ‘
future dreamers’ could gather.
But back to our adventure in San Francisco yesterday: Apparently in this dream series, I’m some kind of ‘consultant’ and after staying in a nice high-rise hotel for a day or two in the dream, we had to rush from the hotel, about 6:45 PM local time, to catch our plane back to the northwest (Seattle).
It’s a familiar trip, and one I’ve made often. What I call “planes” are more like “levitators” in that they seldom get more than 500-feet above the ground and roughly follow terrain contours; much like riding a kids roller-coaster with the up and downs, or so I recalled from a recent southbound trip.
The most striking parts of the dream, however, were what got me to thinking (upon waking and the first half-cuppa joe) about mapping these “inner worlds” where dreams take place.
For one thing, the “inner world” setting seems a much older land than the existing West Coast. For example, east of Seattle there’s a series of rolling hills. Not as flattened as the hills coming down the hill from Denver on I-80 toward Kansas…but certainly nowhere near the sharp foothills of the northwest today.
The impression one gets is that the cities have somehow reemerged in a geologically weathered land in the future and have reconstituted with a new population. Like visiting a far-off future.
Then there was the city of San Francisco itself: The airport was not down at the south end of the Bay, because there was not Bay. In it’s place was a series of high hills almost plateau-shaped. The airport was atop a plateau and located what I’d judge to be northwest of the city, although located only a 15-minute cab ride from our hotel. These hills were covered with deciduous trees.
Some other distinctions of this inner world: One was the key to our hotel room (6234, brass with dark plastic or rubber base where the number was imprinted) was really the key to room #3264. As one of the bellmen explained, “This was to reduce the chance of someone finding a lost key and being able to enter a guest’s room.”
Next notable feature was the elevator system in the hotel. To get to the upper floors, as in some older high rise buildings, you took an elevator to an upper floor, then made a horizontal transfer either by walking to the next bank of elevators, or some of the elevators were capable of making horizontal movements on their own, and then continuing up. I’ve noticed this is other cities in this dream world.
It was the noting of these features that got me to thinking about actually trying to “map” these inner locations, both cartographically and by indexing some of the technology, since it seems somehow important. Not sure where it is, but this ‘inner world” is also where I’ve been “learning things by attending classes” in other dreams, but the knowledge just doesn’t transit the dream/waking boundary well. Again, the properties of this learning might be instructive to share.
All this came together as a question: Did Freud and Jung miss something that might constitute a series of signposts to our shared future by not focusing more on these common dream elements?
Years ago, I talked with Edwin Steinbrecher, author of The Inner Guide Meditation: A Spiritual Technology for the 21st Century
and was impressed with the fact that as part of his “Inner Guide” meditation process he found almost all people - universally – were able to access an “inner world” where direct energy work could be done with embedded personal archetypes.
His book describes a process whereby a person can reconfigure their “outer life” by working with the various archetype energies of the “inner life” (analogous to the tarot system) since these forces seem frequently get out of balance with one another.
For example, doing something seemingly “pointless” (chewing on a pickle, just to pull something out of the air) might be just the act needed to bring an “inner energy, ray, or archetype (call it what you will) into harmony with your other energies.
This chat with Steinbrecher was back in ’85 or ’86; he had visited Seattle to give a talk at the Seattle Jungian Society, and as I sat this morning, contemplating how we’d just barely made our 7:05PM departure from the dream-land version of SF (which arrived just in time for me to wake up in Texas…a neat trick, huh?), I got to noodling how people may well “share an inner world” that we manage to ignore in waking life.
Perhaps there’s nothing to it. But, I’ll post this and a page or two of drawings/maps of my inner world’s geography over on the blog portion of the National Dream Center site.
Curious that if everyone can access their “inner consciousness” well enough to bring back maps. As Steinbrecher has shown, certain mention motions can access the realms (enter a cave, then move ahead, left, and then right, eventually emerging into an inner realm). Not to be taken lightly, though, since the inner realms are fraught with deceptions and ‘false guides’…directed meditation is powerful stuff and takes genuine work.
Some morning, after you have a particularly memorable dream, if you’d sketch out the land where your dreams take place, feel free to send it along.
Email or postal is fine. I can scan and digitize them. Be curious to try and piece together a map of the inner realm, seems like an interesting project.
Oh – by the way: there were no security checkpoints or pat downs in the inner realm – just right to the plane. And it was a small airport, too. About the size of Burbank’s in the mid 1980′s – and no jetways, Just walk out on the apron and up into the plane or whatever it is they are…
