The paragraphs below are variously excerpted from an article, "Dreams are Alive" by Stephen Aizenstat. Read the full article here.
Dreams are alive. Four or five times each night, living images play inside our brains, weaving together ingenious stories. This theater of the night affects our daily experience, shapes our decisions, largely determines who we are and who we become....
We are not isolated living beings on a static and dead landscape; we are participants, constituent members of a living ecology. Our very existence is dependent upon our interacting intimately with other life forms.
The ego lying on the grass with all the other creatures is confronted with the realization that a human being is just one of the many players in this game of life. This holds true in the psychological realm as well as the physical realm. The person who calls himself "I" is one constituent member of the psyche. Imaginal figures are meandering around day and night, within him and without him, each with lives of their own. The ego is but one of many members of a living ecology of imaginal figures that compose a psyche.
A dream is an event in which some of the many imaginal figures of psyche reveal themselves. In the dream, the ego is relativized, often pictured as one of a cast of characters. Other dream figures (human or not) interact with dream ego, and, in the dream, they have lives of their own, physical bodies of their own, feelings and desires of their own. These images are constituent members of life itself.
A dream is one manifestation of nature revealing herself through image. This revelation can reflect one's personal nature, our collective human nature, and/or the nature of the anima mundi—soul in the world....
....To tend a dream is to allow its activity, its rhythm, to return to its own landscape. To hear a dream deeply allows the dream its presence, its being, and its becoming. And as that rhythm returns and the dream again becomes alive, is it not true that we, at that moment, re-experience our natural place as constituent members in nature's psyche, reconnected to a deeply resonant ecology. Are we not in this experience, re-connected to our essential rhythm—sourced by the very pulse of life itself?
The above paragraphs are variously excerpted from an article, "Dreams are Alive" by Stephen Aizenstat. Read the full article here.
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