Ordinary Visions
It’s a lovely, sunny day when my father and I visit a retirement community he is considering — the kind of day where the sky is somehow extra-blue, and the clouds extra-white. The front desk tells us we can feel free to walk around, so we find ourselves headed to an expansive, outdoor area full of patio furniture; plush, green grass; and many residents who are conversing and enjoying drinks, their white-hair matching the passing clouds.
My father and I are soon embraced by a group of residents who invite us to sit with them. They joke, gab, and ask us where we’re from. I’m distracted because a few tables away sits a lone, grey-haired man who looks disheveled and far older than the rest. His wide-eyed gaze is locked on me, and I can’t help but glance sideways at him every now and then to see if his stare ensues. The company at our table notices my distraction and says, “Oh him — don’t worry about him. He’s deaf and blind and mute.” Still, I can’t help but look again. The old man is still staring at me and seems anything but blind. We lock eyes for a few seconds, resting in each other’s gaze. Then, he opens his mouth and talks at a normal volume, though apparently, only I can hear him. He says,
“I love the harmonies you sing.”
Then he erupts in an enormous smile.
I feel aglow with so much awe and appreciation that I wake up with tears of gratitude in my eyes, still half in the dream realm.
My whole core felt resonance with the transmission the old man gave me. It is a dream that continues to reveal its layered meaning to me, but suffice it to say, it provided the encouragement I needed to deep-dive into an exploration of the unconscious and the ways in which it harmonizes with the “main-line-melody” of conscious, waking life. It also provided validation for the ways in which I swim adjacent to the mainstream, harmonizing with it by cultivating the underbelly tones that I intuit are needed for a more robust, whole sound in the collective psyche. I woke up with an emboldened sense that: there is loving-protection to follow my own tune (i.e., the archetype of the father); and there is encouragement from some deep wisdom that I’m on the right track (i.e., the acknowledgment from “blind-deaf-mute,” the archetypal prophet, who sees, hears, and speaks). The “melody” characters (the residents of the retirement community) are warm and welcoming, and not “bad” or inimical; and yet, they can’t ascertain the sage in their midst. I love the harmonies you sing, is both loving acknowledgment of the past and warm encouragement to continue living, speaking, and singing those “minor keys” that are necessary to round-out life’s orchestra. It is a call to express (to sing!) what must be sung to heal the split within and without, to remedy over-cultivated biases. “Singer of Harmonies,” has since become one of the many mythopoetic identities I return to when I need to remind myself what I’m doing in this life; when I need to remember that my efforts have their own subtle, secret beauty; and when I need to feel a sense of camaraderie with the sages, intuits, and all those who sing to their own tune, even when it’s lonely.
It often humbles, baffles, and bemuses me to think of the psyche’s sheer generosity: every night when we dream, we’re gifted images and symbols that seek to guide us towards ever-greater realization, personal and collective. Dreams sometimes reveal, sometimes warn; they sometimes reflect-back attitudes and behaviors we weren’t aware of, or sometimes compensate for biases we live out in waking life. Some dreams are for the dreamer; others are what the Jungians call “big dreams:” meant for the collective. In my own dreamlife, the unconscious has offered powerful symbols, shadowy guides, meaningful landscapes, talking animals, disturbing encounters, ancient primal sounds, and even mysterious voices speaking in Latin — words that I must look up later having never studied one lick of it. In one form or another, the unconscious psyche never gives up its quest to invite (and sometimes demand!) greater wholeness. It reveals that there is no individual mind separate from the collective mind, drawing on all human psychic knowledge at its disposal. It’s taken me a little while to begin to understand the symbolic and non-linear language of the dreamworld, and to resist simplistic, ego-led, and overly-objective or literal interpretations of the images I encounter. I’m certainly no expert, but I can say, with profound gratitude for the unknowable Dream-Maker, that having a relationship with this nighttime symbolic realm has not only deepened my life, it has drastically changed it as well. Many of the life decisions I have made — and even the fundamental manner in which I perceive the world — have been profoundly influenced by what I experience in the depths of sleep.
At the same time, as much as I’d like to paint myself as some kind of special-dream-shaman, I chuckle knowing that it’s always nighttime somewhere around the globe, and that every 24 hours, about 8 billion people dream just like I do. Nothing could be more ordinary than having nighttime visions from the unconcious realm in the form of dreams. What seems unique is our ability to recognize these ordinary visions and harness them for self and collective realization. But, even that is doable. All you need is an ego developed enough to withstand being disturbed, and a heart humble enough to rest in the sheer magic and numinous power of the psyche, without trying to claim or conquer it. The dream realm is a gift meant to unravel your tight parts, not an exercise to create new ones. With practice, we can let these ordinary visions from the dream world detangle us into greater wholeness.
And despite this lengthy introduction, my purpose in writing this blogpost is not to elucidate what I know about the art of dream interpretation. Rather, my hope is to point out how unremarkably-remarkable the visioning and meaning-making apparatus of the human psyche is. It’s truly flabbergasting to me how potent, helpful, and beautiful (even if occasionally uncomfortable) what I experience psychically can be, and yet I know our visioning capacity simply comes with these body-minds we’ve somehow been handed. Each of us has access to an entirely potent realm of symbols, mythopoetic significance, and transrational knowledge. That it seems “special,” is merely a recognition of how transformatively magical this realm is, and a nod to the overflowing sense of gratitude that can come when we open ourselves to it. But, just like being gifted a set of lungs, skin, or vocal chords — I believe the invisible sense organ for accessing ordinary visions and the realm of intuition and meaning-making is inherent, gifted to us all.
I know that not everyone remembers their dreams or has access to them in the same way. This is no failure. Dreams are merely one way to access our ordinary capacity for visioning and meaning making. In this post, I’ll describe three modalities for opening the door to the transrational, symbolic realm: (1) dreams; (2) active imagination; and (3) (what I’m calling) waking psychic immersion. These are by no means exhaustive. The realm is also accessed through yangti yoga (dark retreat), the vast world of art, psychedelics, and many more avenues to boot.
[As an aside, for guidance on dark retreat, check out offerings from a new budding retreat center started by my teacher, Lama Justin Bujdoss. For more on art’s capacity to access the symbolic realm, I’ll kindly refer you to my sister, Nadia, lucid dreamer and artist extraordinaire, whose collection of drawings and paintings capture spiritual and human nuance in a way that defies logic, but is just as real. Check out her instagram here. Also, if you’re interested in psychedelics and don’t know where to start, I have to plug my love, Dave, who has truly navigated psychedelic experience (his own and that of others) with a humility, compassion, and competency that I have yet to encounter elsewhere. Checkout out his website and his amazing resource library.]
So yes, the tributaries to that lead to the river of transrational knowledge are plentiful. Consider this post a humble invitation to get your feet wet and to deepen your relationship with the ordinary visions you are inherently capable of.
Accessing Dreams
One of the earliest dreams I can remember having was at the age of five. In the dream, I’m in my bed and it’s the middle of the night. I see a blue light coming under the bedroom door. I’m terrified, but curious, and eventually work up the courage to get out of bed and walk over the door. I open it slowly, my child (dream) hands shaking.
When I do, I see a blazingly bright Virgin Mary, radiating an almost blinding blue-white light. She stands between my bedroom and that of my parents, and seems powerful rather than dainty, and distressed rather than peaceful. She forcefully and urgently hands me spices and a glass of water, and tells me to mix the two and drink. Though fearful, mesmerized, and confused, I nonetheless do as she asks, and when I’m done, it’s clear Mary seems relieved. She lets out a sigh, her light softens, and her expression becomes peaceful. Then I wake up. In the morning, I tell my mother about the dream. All I can remember is that she spoke to me like an adult and told me that what I experienced was “very, very important.”
Today, my “nerd-alert” mind could dream-journal on the initiatic, alchemical, and dark feminine themes of this dream for hours, highlighting the ways that it came alive throughout my life; but at the time, I remember scratching my head and simply hoping we were having pancakes for breakfast. I didn’t think about dreams consciously until much later. Still, I did have them. And I wasn’t the only one. My mother apparently had effortless lucid dreams (more on lucid dreaming in a future post), and my sister too is a vivid (and frequent lucid) dreamer. Part of me wonders if there is a matrilineal karmic connection to the dream realm since I too have a strong pull to it. But, another part of me knows that it also took some work in my adult life to foster a steady connection to the unconscious dream world and to dream recall. At some point, it does seem like there is a bit of effort required: a willingness from the conscious mind to open the blue-illuminated door, in spite of our terror or reservations, and to dare imbibe on the numinous.
So are visions inherently accessible to us, or must the ability to access them be cultivated? My own hunch is: yes and yes. Both the nature and nurture components of our access to transrational wisdom make visions quite ordinary. On one hand, we come with the ability to imagine, to intuit, and to make meaning. It’s part of our makeup, just like having a two eyes, a nose, and mouth. I truly believe we are far more than just our conscious, waking, and seemingly-individual minds, and we naturally have the ability to realize that fact. And, at the same time, just like someone gifted with lungs is usually not automatically an expert at holding their breath underwater, perhaps it also takes some intentional effort to signal our openness to the watery depths of the unconscious psyche. For me, I notice there are pre-dream activities I do that help enhance the vividness and recall of my dreams, and there are also post-dreams activities that continue to foster a healthy, dialogic relationship to the unconscious. So, we come with the ordinary ability to have visions, yes; but perhaps we also have to somehow “signal” the unconscious to “bring it on” and remind the conscious mind to witness and remember.
I do this by:
Explicitly telling myself, “I will remember my dreams” before going to bed. Then I repeat, repeat, repeat the phrase in my mind. Kind of like thinking you have to wake up early for a flight, then preparing your 5:00am departure plan, and then setting your alarm: the repeat effort around the desire to wakeup early somehow has you automatically waking up just before the clock strikes 5:00.
I explain to my unconscious why I want to remember my dreams. “For greater wholeness;” “to see my blindspots so as to not cause harm;” “to understand others;” “for the love of liberation;” “to know what needs to be known;” “to move in the world with wisdom;” “to love more fully;” “to see what the Buddhas know: that there are no enemies.” The more authentically connected to an open-hearted intention, the better. My intuition is that this creates an emotional connection to the desire to recall dreams, and therefore strengthens our ability to do so.
Keeping up a regular meditation practice. Practicing being uncontrived, aware, and loving towards anything that wants to arise in the field of the mind somehow signals to the unconscious that we are welcoming a relationship to it.
Studying (yes, books!) dream yoga, dream recall, depth psychology, the unconscious, Carl Jung, or any related topics. Doing this during the day-time somehow primes your night-time mind to test out what you have learned.
After waking up:
If your dreams start to escape you, lie in the position you were in when you were dreaming. The body knows. It can recall the dream longer than the conscious witness.
Journal about your dreams by jotting down what you can remember, even if it’s fuzzy or just a feeling. The unconscious doesn’t always know if we’re really ready and willing, and somehow the act of dream journaling, even if it doesn’t yield any insights, sends a signal to the psyche that we’re invested and listening.
Let the dream images work on you rather than coming to neat conclusions. The transrational realm of symbols is not neat or conceptually tidy. Symbols are different than signs in that there is no end to the depth of their layered meaning. By not conceptually contorting your dream, but letting it reveal more insights to you throughout the week (or month or decade!), somehow a flowing, natural dialogue starts to take place between the conscious and unconscious realms. Insight is a spontaneous result of this relationship. When consciousness doesn’t try to change the unconscious, but slowly familiarizes itself with the unconscious’ imagistic language: somehow, the unconscious speaks.
Active Imagination
Dreams aren’t the only way to access our ordinary capacity for visioning. Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Gustav Jung often discussed “active imagination” as another avenue for accessing the unconscious realm. He described active imagination as a process of dreaming with open eyes. I like to describe it as visioning while awake (with the physical eyes open or closed). There are many ways to do it. You can invite a specific event, situation, or a dream you don’t understand to appear “in your mind’s eye,” and subsequently let go and “watch” how the psyche develops it with a chain of images and symbols. My active imagination sessions are often a little more “free-form.” After some open-awareness meditation, I might, in a felt sense, invite the unconscious to show me what I need to see. What appears is often first a landscape, then characters, and then an encounter (most components of which defy logic), but other times, I “see” more abstract symbology of the Self that is just as meaningful. Whatever arises points me back to my entirety by highlighting an aspect of being I don’t yet know or have forgotten. I don’t always immediately understand what I see. I let the images work on me.
My partner, Dave, has a lovely trick to help people understand more about active imagination. He often says, “call to mind where you ate breakfast yesterday morning. Wherever that image appeared, that psychic space is the ‘place’ where active imagination occurs.”
Though profound unconscious messaging can arise in the same place as where you “see” yesterday’s breakfast nook, for Jung, it was really important to distinguish active imagination from “day-dreaming.” The two might happen in the same psychic space but they function differently, especially with regards to which part of the mind is “taking the lead.” Jung described day-dreaming as more mundane: it is the invention of the conscious mind alone and is typically about every-day matters, remaining in a surface-level realm of personal or daily experience. I’ll add that, often (though certainly not always), we recognize a day-dream only retroactively. Active imagination, however, is a gift from the unconscious in the form of non-literal symbolism, which unfolds within a field of unpinnable awareness or diffuse conscious “watching.” It both arises and is known in this borderless present moment. The experience is not orchestrated by the conscious mind, but simply unfolds with its light observation. Said more succinctly by Jung himself: through active imagination, “a new situation is created in which the unconscious contents are exposed in the waking state.” (Volume 14 of the Collected Works, para.706).
Active imagination is not meant to be a substitute for daily living or otherwise segregated from it. Quite the contrary. Whatever is experienced during a session of active imagination, like a dream, is meant to be “made flesh,” that is: to be integrated and incarnated constructively (not literally). For example, if you see a Medusa scream her head off in your active imagination, tearing your clothes off as she does it, it might be time to challenge (“strip”) the persona (the outer psychic layers we like the world to see) and harness some healthy, authentic aggression. We don’t need to scream at anyone, but we can allow the dialogic relationship between unconscious imagery and conscious logic to inspire some new, constructive attitudes and behaviors. In the case of good ol’ Medusa, an emergent harnessing of the image might look like quitting a job, setting some boundaries, coming into greater authenticity, defending your needs, or monitoring the serpentine-truth-telling-shadow within whilst navigating social dynamics. To have a relationship with our unconscious is to allow ourselves to be influenced by our wholeness, by the fullness of reality. In a very real (though symbolic) sense, what we are imagining in active imagination is true, even if it defies logic. “They are facts,” Jung often said, and should therefore be taken into consideration.
I’ve noticed both materialists and spiritual-types alike harbor doubts about active imagination, though for different reasons. Those who have an over-cultivated focus on the world of form and things, i.e., who adopt a materialistic “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” attitude, often have difficulty respecting the importance and meaningfulness of what can arise psychically during dreams and active imagination. Similarly, nondual spiritual practitioners who train in disregarding all passing mental content sometimes underestimate its potency, especially as a legitimate vehicle for greater self-realization. I’m not at all disparaging the importance of cultivating equanimity and non-indulgence in juicy thoughts during formal meditation practice, but sometimes we also need an adjacent or separate practice to honor and receive psychic gifts from our depths.
Jung too warned that our doubts about active imagination or the importance of dreams can become a significant obstacle to healing our neuroses. His recommendation? A little humility: some observation and concession by the conscious mind that it isn’t the only psychic game in town. If it was, why do we end up living out what we consciously insist we don’t want, or find ourselves with emotions disproportionate to a situation? In a great sweep of irony, our vehement skepticism about the transrational realm is often a sign that we intuit its existence: it’s the ego’s attempt to rouse certainty and safety in the presence of something far more powerful. In a highly materialistic and extroverted culture, where we’re often conditioned to associate “imagination” with some kind of child-like “delusion,” “fancy,” or “distorted reality,” psychic sight is regularly disregarded as fiction. And yet, there it is in each of us, whether dormant or awake: an ordinary capacity to invite-in the symbolic realms of mind, for the sake of living into our fullness.
Waking Psychic Immersion
It’s happened more times than I can remember: I dream or have an active imagination about a very specific symbol, scene, or image, and there it is, the next hour or day, depicted before me in “real life.” There was the dream about the key with an incredibly unique top and style, which was subsequently placed in my hand by my new landlord the next morning, reinforcing the dream message and sending chills up my spine. And there was the dream about the family of spiders: a large, medium, and tiny one, and the next afternoon, in my waking life, when I closed the bathroom door at a new coffee shop around the block, there they were: the same species, in their spun web, in the crack of the stall door, in the same position and order the Dream Maker had depicted them in. I chuckled as I peed, suddenly understanding the dream contents. Or there was the time that I had an emotional active imagination wherein the ancestral dead gifted a lake-full of lotuses from the depths to communicate something that stirred me. Later that morning, I decided to go on a hike. As I was inwardly releasing some accumulated grief from week (I work as a hospice chaplain), I tripped and fell. I felt disoriented and vulnerable, but after wiping the dust from my eyes, the first thing I saw was this pond of lotuses (see below), and I burst into grateful tears of understanding.
The third and last tributary to the transrational I’ll mention is as ordinary and accessible as the first two. I call it “waking psychic immersion.” It’s not so much an activity as much as it is a natural experience we notice. Waking psychic immersion happens when we become aware of the mysterious, synchronistic connection between the seemingly-separate “inner” and “outer” worlds in a way that reinforces a felt (and often previously unconscious) insight or understanding. It is not about being “psychic” in the sense of being able to “see what will happen in the future,” but is instead about noticing how two (or more) non-causal events can be linked together by a numinous sense of meaningfulness. One occurrence enhances the meaning of the other, and vice versa, and we are left in awe that the psyche is not limited to some“interior place.”
Far more than a mere amusing coincidence, the synchronicity of waking psychic immersion is something of a gestalt phenomenon: there is an emergent meaningfulness that is experientially made clear (or emphasized) as a result of a mysterious pairing of symbolic events. The meaningfulness that arises is not initially conceptual: it is instead felt — profoundly so. In fact, one of the signs that a moment of waking psychic immersion has occurred is that our conceptual minds stop for a moment, even if it’s a very brief moment. Like being immersed in a river of felt meaningfulness before taking a drink of articulable meaning; waking psychic immersion initially feels like bathing in something beyond words, even if soon after we let our thinking minds imbibe on a more conceptual version of the experience, perhaps in the form of journaling, reflecting, or talking to a friend.
And yet, despite the mysterious profundity of waking psychic immersion, the experience is also quite common and ordinary. Everyone has moments of having their deepest intuitions, dreams, insights, or unconscious contents validated in the so-called “physical” plane. For me, the question is whether or not people “believe” their transrational experiences enough to fully integrate them. Given that the typical ego’s M.O. is certainty and predictability, the ego usually tries to minimize waking psychic immersion as “just a coincidence,” especially when it is confronted by the mystery, numinosity, and humbling awe these types of experiences often entail. Moreover, many of us are not primed for the implications of waking psychic immersion: it forces a more nondual understanding of mind/psyche/self (which, in turn, can fan the flames of the ego’s fears!) Unless we’re used to appreciating what happens without knowing how it happens, we’ll often seek safety in simplistic logic alone, even if doing so denies our experience.
If we do have an ego developed enough to handle dialoging with mystery, we seem to find waking psychic immersion most dazzling and dramatic when the symbolic event first emerges in our dreams or active imagination, and then subsequently manifests in our waking life. The dream “comes alive;” or the active imagination’s message is reinforced on your way to work. But, waking psychic immersion can also occur the other way around, starting in everyday life:
Last spring, for example, I meditated at a cabin in the woods for five days, and I literally could not make logical sense of what I was observing and experiencing with my senses. The entire natural world — including the wood my cabin was made out of, the trees, the plants, the insects, and animals — was “coming alive” so vividly and strongly, I was stumped as to how to even describe the experience to myself. To say the space was haunted would be the understatement of the century, minimizing the interdependent wildness of the surrounding energy. The bees, animals, wind, water, sky and sound all seemed to be on performance enhancing drugs (I promise, I was not). Moreover, everything seemed keen on “playing,” as if wanting to come ever-closer to the “boundary” with my mind. Truth be told, I actually left my retreat two days early (I had planned to stay for a week), given how terrifying it all was to my certainty-oriented ego.
Yet sure enough, dreams over the next several days and weeks offered countless episodes of synchronistic guidance. I had dreams of waltzing with loving, wild animals; of speaking with blades of grass; and of morphing easily into and out of our natural world. The dreamworld seemed to reinforce the waking life’s experience so I could assimilate the memo: “see how illusory the separation between the natural world and the realm of our ego consciousness is?” Then synchronicity of synchronicities, a book literally popped off the shelf at my favorite used bookstore in Santa Rosa. The title: “Living in the Borderland,” by Jerome Bernstein. In it, Bernstein (a depth psychologist and Jungian analyst) describes the evolution of Western consciousness and the emergence of the ‘Borderland’ — a spectrum of reality that is beyond the rational yet is palpable, knowable, and experienceable — and that has the opportunity to provide individual and collective healing through the way it bridges the illusory mind-body and human-nature divide. I highly recommend it!
My partner Dave often notices the way in which waking psychic immersion happens in conjunction with his own psycho-therapeutic practices. He uses Internal Family Systems (IFS) personally and with clients. If you’re not familiar, this method involves helping people identify different parts of themselves (sub-personalities), some of which carry wounds or are in conflict with one another. The goal is to foster an interior space of welcome and understanding in relationship to these parts with the goal of fostering healing and discovering the healthy, authentic Self. IFS can involve witnessing the visualizations sub-personalities reveal, i.e., observing the images and feelings interior parts evoke to better understand their needs and points of view (a kind of active imagination). Dave will often receive very specific and powerful images from his parts, and then, poof! There is the image again, now depicted physically in waking life, often on one of his long, morning hikes. Did one cause the other? Who freaking knows! It’s not important. What’s important is that: the two events psychically “click,” and reveal or reinforce an underlying unconscious meaning that is true.
During a particularly intense period, one that Carl Jung called his “confrontation with the unconscious,” he admitted that he had to regularly remind himself of his relative world circumstances, saying things to himself like “I am Professor Jung. I have a family and clients. I live in Switzerland. My wife’s name is Emma.” Apparently things got so blended, it was important to reassert these kind of statements to stay planted in conventional reality. Some historians even think Jung was psychotic, but I’m not so sure.
To be clear: I haven’t felt the need for that kind of relative world self-talk, but I’m nowhere near the mind that Jung was. What I’ll say is this: the psychic and physical realms are not separate, even if they appear to be so. To the extent we can hold both sides of that equation in our awareness, I’m not sure there’s much risk. We don’t need to be scared of the ordinary fundamental inter-penetrability and lack of solidity of reality (psychic and physical alike), but nor should we deny that there are differences on a relative level between psychic structures and physical structures — they appear differently to the comparing mind. Holding both of these relative and ultimate truths, so far, hasn’t gotten me into any trouble.
Don’t Believe the Hype, Believe the Ordinary
If you’ve managed to get to the end of this blogpost, I tip my hat to you and consider you a kindred spirit. It’s my belief that sometimes the most ordinary experiences nonetheless require some fellowship given how hostile the conventional, materialistic world can be to the spiritual dimensions of the universe — that is: to the most fundamental and ordinary dimensions of the universe. Even spiritual types can sometimes make mystical experiences seem so rare and attenuated from our everyday experience, that they ironically concretize these experiences into something rigid. But what if, just like breathing in and breathing out, you vision and make meaning? What if you are born with a connection to this mysterious (yet accessible) dimension of transrational symbolism? And what if the conscious, logical mind were a friend, not an oppressor, capable of dialoging with (and sometimes taking a back seat to) unconscious contents? These questions make me want to sing harmonies! So, with that, my friends, I’ll leave you with this:
