Linda Yael Schiller, MSW, LICSW

Integrative and Embodied Dreamwork and Healing

With you as my therapist I finally learned to trust another human being. You helped me discover faith in the world and in myself. I didn’t think that was going to be possible. You have been a real gift in my life.

-- J.C.

Dreaming: A Spiritual Experience

“I do not generally associate technology and magic, but I see that spirits use any means necessary to communicate with us in ways we can accept.  They use dreams and they use Google.  The combination is breathtaking.  And a little humorous”. Deena Metzger

 

Welcome dreamers,

In tending to our dreams we tap into a timeless and eternal threshold across time and space, across stars and worlds. Dream tending allows us an opportunity to have a direct encounter with things we do not understand.  This might be the hallmark of what we call a spiritual experience: A direct encounter with something sacred and mysterious that we are moved, touched, awed, or tickled by.  It could be a flower, a melody, a full bodied belly laugh, a dream. If we don’t completely pick it apart, but stay with the mystery and the beauty (even at times the horrible beauty) of it, it can become for us a sacred encounter.

When we read the sacred texts of most spiritual belief systems we find passages and stories describing sacred encounters with divine figures: angels and demons, gods and goddesses, devils and guides.  Some of these encounters are described in the texts as dreams, others as visions, others as everyday encounters that our ancestors were not particularly surprised by, since they accepted these encounters more readily than we do as part of life.  The places these encounters occur then are deemed Holy Places, as the place itself maintains the aura or resonance of this encounter. (for example Jerusalem, Stonehenge, Delphi, Sedona, the Bodhi tree in India- if you’ve been to any of these places, the “thin-boundaried” among us can tune in to a certain vibratory energy in the environs).  These spots then may become a place of pilgrimage where others may encounter the un-namable Essence that remains in that place.

In our modern age, we are often sadly lacking in the thrill of the type of direct encounters our ancestors described with holy forces.  In fact, when some one today tells us of encounters with angels or spirits, we may first wonder about their mental health, rather than assume that they have access to the sacred realms.  For better or worse, we have become more linear, more “scientific”, less apt to trust in that which we cannot prove beyond a shadow of a doubt.  In doing so we lose an important avenue for the refreshment our own spirits and for sharing that refreshment with others. If we take advantage of one of the portals into mystery through tending our dreams, we can reconnect with the Source of Life and renewal that our ancestors took much more for granted.

Dreams offer us an opportunity to have a direct experience with the sacred: after all, when we dream, we are having a direct experience with whatever has come through during the night.  How do we know this?  Because we resonate physically and emotionally to our dreams- we wake anxious, or thrilled, or curious about what just happened.  Our bodies act out the movements in our dream/sleep just as if we were awake (luckily we have bio-chemicals that keep us firmly in our beds most of the time though!) Our bodies knew that we were “there”, even if our minds are doubting Thomases when we awake.   Even if our waking minds click in quickly to tell us that it was “just a dream”, our deeper self knows that we were having the encounters in another reality.  You know that in- between place – the threshold space between sleep and waking.  It seems to me that is the space that verifies the reality of both places before our left brain clicks in to tell us it cannot be so.  We are in 2 places at once, remembering both. 

We don’t need to understand something for it to work, or have meaning or influence on our lives.  Penicillin for example.  How many of us really- I mean really- know how it works?- yet it saves our lives over and over.  One of my favorite examples of how unseen and unknown forces may work is the description of germs in the book  “The Fiery Cross”,  from the Outlander series by Diana Gabeldon.  Clair, a 20th century doctor and healer who has traveled back in time through the standing stones to Scotland in the 17th century, explains to her partner Jamie, a Scottish Highlander about the “little beasties” she calls germs that cannot be seen, touched, or encountered in any way (in that era).  Jamie, a true man of his time, is quite skeptical of this strange notion. However, after Clair is able to concoct a batch of penicillin from moldy bread and reverse the spreading septic infection in his leg, he  is willing to accept the truth of her “magic” .

In fact, the whole series is about the ability to move back and forth in the space/time continuum (as well as an adventure/romance), and what it means to have information from one world while living in another.  In terms of dreaming, we move back and forth in much the same way. Remembering our dreams gives us that same opportunity to go back and forth across the threshold to bring gifts from other realms, and to remember that which was once known.  “Re-member” means to re-connect, to re-join; to literally put the limbs (the members) of ourselves back together with the rest of our bodies, to remember the connections between our bodies and our souls.  This then, is one the gifts of the dream.

Dream deep,

Linda Yael

 

 

 

 

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Go deep into yourself, and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.

-- Rilke