Dreams give us a doorway into a strange and wonderful world. Although it appears to have many of the features of our waking world, such as people, animals, objects and places, it is nevertheless full of subtle surprises and differences.
To enter this world while asleep leaves us largely unaware of its possibilities.
To take waking awareness into our entrance, as happens when we explore a dream through dream processing, unfolds the magic impact of what we meet.
When we open the door of dreams in this way we begin a journey. It has stages, problems to surmount and things to learn, just like any journey. Many people have already travelled before us, and there are books such as Alice in Wonderland, The Odyssey, Exploring Inner Space, and Altered States oj Consciousness which describe journeys and the terrain.
Although we might meet the heights of religious experience as well as the depths of human despair on the journey, in simple terms it is primarily a journey into a confrontation with our own potential, our own fear, our own prison bars of thought and habit, our own ability to lift perception beyond what we have known before and look at the world, and our life in it, from new perspectives.
It is a journey towards greater maturity in which we face the humbling vision of our own littleness, the moving encounter with the vulnerable child we once were, the cleaning out of the store cupboards of resentment, hurt and anger, the D1Y of conscious renewal of our identity, and the meeting with Love as we experience ourself as a living participator in the wonder of life. We look at birth, we meet death, we gaze into the vast depths of space out of which our being has arisen. Then we find ourselves seeing the faces of the other human beings we live with, and recognising we are all on the journey, and we only have each other. Realising we are all waves on a shoreless sea—from no port we move to no destination—we understand our self responsibility, and consider what we will to do with the momentum of our life.
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