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The Great Dream | by Travis Carrier, SOI | March 2024

Every moment from the moment you are born until the moment you die; you are dreaming in one way or another. Everything that enters through your senses, every experience, interaction, and event that takes place is added to the total collection of what you have been and have known throughout your entire life.

All of this – including your choices, creations, desires, and expectations – are fragments of your dreaming.

If all of this is dreaming, then what are your night dreams?

At night, with your body in a posture ready to rest and everything quieting down, you slip back into that primordial ground behind the busy activity of the outer world, yet even here you are inundated with shapes, forms, feelings, sensations, and images of people and things that you know from your everyday existence.

How can you possibly make sense of it all?

Are you more than this seemingly disconnected jumble of information? Or are these night dreams just another addition to the busy-ness and chaos of movement that takes place all around you during the day?  Or are your dreams meaningful encounters with your very own beneficent desire to return to alignment?

Our dreams are a form of night dancing – the creative and imaginal play of our subconscious.  Yet, this level of dreaming is only the first level of dreamwork, where you begin to decipher the messages coming from within you as a new way to develop and enlarge your consciousness.

 

Interested in learning more about how to use your dreams – and imagery – gain new, revelatory insights about yourself and manifest your life in new ways? Join Travis for a special 2-day workshop on Kabbalah & the Power of Dreaming in April 2024!

 

Dreaming is intended to reveal the gifts your dreams offer you. As you deepen your dreaming practice,  and become used to the movements of dreams, you will more and more easily  to recognize the messages rising up to the surface. This leads you to becoming more authentic as you learn to transform your emotions, habits, and attitudes  –  all the while getting closer to the Great Dream: the vision,  prophecy, or revelation that takes you on your way.

Whether you are aware of it yet, you already know what your dreams are telling you because you have asked the question that made the dream arise. The opportunity now is to make your question conscious because the discovery of what is gestating within you is the opening to the treasure of your true imagination.

The revelation of your true imagination gives you a pause from your usual night dance of dreaming – the patterns as you now experience them; and this pause, even if just for a moment, will allow the light within you to shine with more vibrancy, clarity, and direction. Or to think of it another way – you can pause from one night dance to allow in another.

This pause will enable you to transform your entire life as you learn to listen to the empty space behind all things. For a moment, you transcend all the accumulated patterns into that deeper space of pure emanation and creativity, what follows from this explosion of color and light is a synergy between you and all that you interface with. These moments are rare.  But they are worth it!

Through the work we call Kabbalah and the power of dreaming, you can begin to stretch these instances more and more into what we might call a long thought…or what I like to imagine as a clear, wide window. Kabbalah means to receive.  The tradition known as the Kabbalah of Light informs the dreamwork that I do and my dream work with others.  It is open to all, regardless of belief system….it is open to all who wish to receive what our dreams and images can truly reveal.

If you want to learn about your greatest path in life, you must first consult your dreaming to see if your subconscious reflects this desire. For example, if someone wants to move to another country but the dreaming suggests staying put,  either the desire is a projection of their emotions such as fear, in this example, and this person acts on this emotion instinctually through movement by running away. This emotion would then need to be cleared.

On the other hand, it could be that the contradiction between the inner and outer desire is a result of needing to listen to the inside first in order to fulfill the great dream of what s/he has come here to do in this life.  Either way, the subconscious never lies!

As you take the plunge into your dreaming as a practice, you are presented with the important work of separating the wheat from the chaff… learning to listen with your true ear, to see with your true eye,  and as with all of your true senses, refining your perception.

The word for dream interpreter in Hebrew, poter, uses the same letters in different configurations as the Hebrew words for beautiful, charming, and sewing. This signifies that they all have a similar root meaning and are related. It is by learning to engage with the messages of your dreams, both night dreams and daydreams, that you may sew a beautiful tapestry of your life in many colors rather than just living according to the one that has formed unintentionally… To perceive is to change. Then you develop your intent and your will, pulling your power down and through the refreshed sensory doorways. Your will and intent are a fire igniting all the old patterns and making new pathways for your greatest dream to manifest in your life.

At The School of Images, we use the metaphor of a ladder of dreaming to represent the different levels of dreams. Upon each rung you can get a sense of where you have arrived at any given instance. As you make the journey up and down and back and forth until you have expanded in all directions, you realize that you contain multitudes of perceptions, images, and possibilities.

Want to learn more? SOI offers many ways to climb this ladder of dreams –  from brief introductions to extended workshops and longer-term classes.  I invite you to join my next workshop on this revelatory approach to creating the life of your dreams, Kabbalah and the Power of Dreaming, online on April 13-14, 2024.