Dreaming the Field: The Importance of Dreams
Copyright 2006 Mary Desaulniers
Seven months before my husband was diagnosed with terminal
cancer, I was plagued by a series of unsettling dreams; some
pointed unequivocally to his subsequent death; others spoke as
oracles did with forked tongues. However, there was one dream in
particular that convinced me not only of life beyond life as we
know it, but also of life beyond death.
I was awakened by my husband's voice: "Who's coming up the
stairs?" And I remembered seeing in my dream two translucent
shadows ( like wings) coming up the stairs and standing before
us at the foot of our bed. These were strange beings without
human features, shapeless, giving the impression of
wings--translucent, elusive wings. Yet I knew somehow they were
wise and sentient beings, deep with a knowing beyond this world.
They were coming for my husband. I placed my hand over his body.
Not now, not yet, I said.
In retrospect, I see these dreams as shifts in alignment, much
like the moving and sliding of plates on the outer earth surface
when a stressed fault ruptures. Our sensory apparatus,
responding to our own psychic and emotional fault lines, tilt
and move to match the incline of new perceptual fields. When
that happens, we open floodgates to new images and metaphors,
new ways of seeing.
If we are indeed matter evolving towards consciousness, then
dreams have a large role in bringing us to consciousness. The
inner realm parallels the outer realm in ways that defy logic.
And the outer world, far from being random, reverberates with
echoes of its own inner state. In the few months preceding the
diagnosis of my husband's illness, our outer world was shaking
with signs of our dismantling: our youngest son developed
problems at school, appliances in the house kept breaking down
one after the other--the fridge, washing-machine, garage door,
furnace. It seemed a major upheaval in our lives was being
announced on every level of consciousness.
Strange as this situation may seem to those who firmly believe
in a solid- matter world ( as I once did), the possibility of
dreams being precognitive or prophetic is not really so
far-fetched if one considers recent developments in the field of
physics. Here the search for solid matter has uncovered a
paradox--that things are in reality "no-thing." The search for
what actually makes up matter has brought the physicist face to
face with empty space or vacuum. But this vacuum is not really
empty at all; it is a bubbling sea of wave
potential--un-manifested electrons, virtual (but not fictional)
electrons that can materialize, that is, become positive
particles when sufficient energy is made available to them. If
enough energy is added to the zero-point field of quantum
vacuum, this empty space is capable of spontaneously giving
birth to bits of real, tangible "stuff." Such is the theory
behind Big Bang--the birth of the Universe.
In effect then, according to quantum theory, something can come
out of nothing. Yet this something is temporary at best, for the
Universe is overwhelmingly nothing. We are nothing. We, like
matter, spontaneously bubble up and disappear; we, like the
particles, erratically dissolve into wave functions. We are
temporary states, insubstantial as dreams.
Humbling as this notion may be, it is the only way we can access
infinity, the only way we can understand that we are more than
our physical bodies. Might dreams be the avenue through which we
connect to the field of global consciousness? Might dreams be
part of the brain's ability to access a realm beyond space and
time that embraces not only the present, but past and future as
well?
It is this ability that Joseph Chilton Pearce so passionately
argues for in "Evolution's End" ( Harper San Francisco : 1992)
where he points to our innate ability to move beyond space and
time. This is the same ability he sees in the idiot-savant ( so
popularly characterized in "Rain Man"). Pearce gives as examples
the "calendrical twins," who have both been institutionalized
since age 7. The twins cannot fend for themselves or add up
simple numbers; yet, they have demonstrated the most remarkable
mathematical ability. They can, for example, give instantaneous
responses to questions like these: Which date will Easter fall
on 10,000 years from now? Assuming that there is one grain of
rice on the first of 64 squares and assuming that the grain is
doubled on each subsequent square, how many grains of rice will
there be on the final square?
How is it that these "savants" who can neither read nor write be
capable of such highly complex mathematical skills? asks Pearce.
His suggestion is that somehow their brains have been able to
resonate with a narrow spectrum of field knowledge. Intelligence
exists as separate fields of capacity and the twins have been
able to access a spectrum of these fields.
So can we --if we allow ourselves this capacity by cultivating
the wave-form potential within us. The choice is ours to develop
this potential by nurturing our power of connection through
dream work, meditation, brain entrainment, prayer, through ways
that allow us to be in touch with the field beyond space and
time. This we can do by making time for Spiritwork--silence,
solitude, inwardness. Spiritwork asks that we listen to
ourselves, our bodies and know what speaks within. Most of all,
it asks that we surrender the self in order to find it. And this
is why the path is most fruitful because the self that surfaces
eventually is shapeless, translucent, elusive like dreams, yet
deep with a sense that surpasses all understanding.