For years, I was tormented by dreams of being chased by wolves and packs of angry dogs. Usually I would wake up from fright, but sometimes not before one of them sunk their teeth into me or scratched at my hands and face.

In waking life, I’m a dog lover who raised and trained several dogs. In particular, I helped raise a beautiful Alaskan Malamute/German Shepard mix named Bandit who was also a quarter wolf. He lived only 7 years due to a faulty heart. So my nightmares do not come from a fear of unknowing, but rather a legacy of love, which always confused me further. What am I so scared of?

When discussing animal dreams, often we are tempted to focus on the traits and characteristics of the animals, reducing our relationship to a symbol or metaphor. This is valid, especially when we look at the evolutionary significance of “wild” animals and our collective relationship to them throughout the eons. Clearly, packs of wolves were once a threat to humans, especially lone people or children out in the open. Wolves are cunning, able to organize hunting parties, follow tracks and wait for the right opportunity. Yet, more often than not, wolves and humans lives peacefully in the same land-base, except when they successfully taxed our livelihood, such as in sheep-herding or ranching cultures.

Wolves make a good mirror. They are highly social, with a similar pecking order to human groups, with well-established alphas, betas and zetas. Wolves are loyal, intelligent and capable of great feats of endurance. They howl when excited, preen and groom one another, and alpha pairs can form lasting pair-bonds to raise pups.

But the wolves in my dreams are more than symbols of my cunning or my aggressiveness. As depth psychologist James Hillman says in a 1994 interview with Jonathan White about animal symbols in dreams, “Animals come into our own dreams as guides, helpers, and saviors… they teach us about something, but they are not a part of us.  The bear dream that one man had corresponds to his own earthy, shaggy nature, and therefore he can feel an affinity.  But that bear is not his own shaggy nature.  That reduces the bear to just a piece of himself and insults the bear – it interprets the bear away.”

The Dream Provides the Solution

A few years ago, I told an elderly German psychotherapist about my wolf dreams and my inability to proceed when the animals attack, despite often becoming lucid in the dream. Should I fight them off? Allow myself to be devoured as some sort of initiation rite? As with many lucid dreams, my self-awareness seemed to bungle the dream rather than provide clarity.

She suggested something else. “Reach into your pocket and pull out a gift for them.” I was struck by the simplicity of this action. I asked how would I know what to give them and she answered, “That is up to the dream, not you.”

A month or so later, the wolves came back. I was running through a clearing in the woods and climbed halfway up a tree when I became self-aware. I remembered the woman’s words. As the wolves snapped their teeth at me all around, I put my hand in my pocket and pulled out a cloth pouch. Inside, I found raw, red meat. I offered it up and the wolves hungrily ate from my hands. I could feel their teeth scrape against my flesh and soon they were licking my fingers. I looked around and saw they were now non-aggressive and awaiting my direction. I thought, “Go” and they instantly took off, running back to the forest.

I have not had terrifying wolf dreams since then. While I still do not know the full story of who these wolves are and how they are connected to me, but I have forged a relationship that continues to grow.  On more than one occasion I have called the wolves in my dreams when I needed aid. They come running now, not to hunt, but to help.

This article originally appeared at the Dream Tribe, a group blog for exploring the healing power of dreams.

“God sleeps in stone, breathes in plants, dreams in animals, and awakens in man”  – Hindu Proverb

Let’s widen the circle a little.  When dreamwork is usually discussed, the assumption is that the dream reflects back my issues, my concerns, and my life. After all, it is my dream!  But of course dreams reflect so much more.  Not only do they reveal our family dynamics, but they also expose socio-economic class, regional affiliations, and the frameworks of our culture-at-large.

Finally, dreams reflect our humanity, and how we are embedded in the natural world, or what eco-philosopher David Abram calls the “more-than-human-world.”  The reason this perspective is not often talked about is because one of the frameworks of our culture-at-large is that we are each individual cogs in an unthinking machine called Earth.

So it takes a little work to do eco-dreaming – which I loosely define as dreaming as if the earth is alive and trying to communicate with us. I am convinced that part of dreams’ evolutionary advantage is how they not only reflect our embeddedness in nature, but also provide warnings of probable dangers and opportunities for our community.

Humans Manage EcoSystems

Let me make a small anthropological diversion here.  We humans are smart and adaptive creatures with a defined environmental role of optimizing the ecosystem we live in.  That’s what we do, and we have been doing this successfully for millennia.   (The last six thousand years are a trickier matter – the self-serving needs of civilization have largely co-opted this role, leading to widespread environmental degradation around the globe.)

In prehistoric times, before the population explosion and the widespread domestication of grain, the earth’s peoples (hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, marine farmers, and pastoralists) left the land better than they found it most of the time.  Yeah, they screwed up too: Easter Island being a good example of prehistoric deforestation.  However, cultivating food forests, sculpting estuaries and reefs, fertilizing soil, preventing wildfires, and keeping herd populations in check is how our ancestors spend most of their time: improving on nature’s design.

Speaking anthropologically, land management is probably the closest thing to a collective purpose for human society.  This is our deep nature, and it is reflected in our dreams.

Contemporary Ecodreaming Societies

Not everyone has forgotten the connections between dreams and nature, of course.  Many indigenous peoples today view dreams as a voice of the earth, too many to list here.  Here are some recently published ancedotes:

The Orang Asli tribes of Malaysia. Indigenous healers/dreamers transform into animals in their vision and dream states to gather information about the forest they live in. According to anthropologist Diana Riboli, these dreams result in the discovery of new healing plants, as well as information about the best time to move the seasonal villages before the rain seasons begin.

The Beaver Indians of British Columbia, Canada. According to Hugh Brody in his book Maps and Dreams (2002), Hunters, until very recently, incubated dreams before the hunt, made a kill in the dream, and soonafter would find the “dream trail” and the animal, collecting the kill in waking life.

The mountain villages of Peru. In the 1990s, during the genocide of mestizo villagers by the Maoist Shining Path (who are making a comeback, btw), dreamers were consulted about the best time for entire families to leave camp and hide in the forests.   More recently, according to anthropologist Arianna Ciconni, villagers claim that dreams led them to the locations of their relatives’ mass graves.

For more information on the anthropology of dreams, I heartily recommend Barbara Tedlock’s edited volume.

Are ecological dreams psychic?

Don't forget the crystals

Our Western worldview is continously tested by native and anthropological accounts of their dreams.  Personally, I’ve found that the more I study my dreams, the more opportunities to say “that’s impossible” emerge.  Not that the anthropologists I referenced are not saying that ecological dreams are psychic.

Perhaps these accounts are artifacts of what we may already know, but have actively repressed or not consciously noticed.  These dreams could bring to the surface of consciousness all kinds of “submerged observations,” such as  complex bodily intuitions about weather patterns and the location of game (or mass graves), or auditory threat factors that literally “ride on the wind” through the myriad of animal signs in the forest.

Or maybe they’re psychic.  Again, just like the mystery of dreams that predict illness, I think the most important thing is that we just get the message.

How to Invite the World back into your Dreams

1. Pay attention to animal dreams. In your dream journal, tag dreams that have animals with an icon or image.   According to dream researcher Bitsy Broughton, simply noticing when animals are present will actually increase their participation in our dreams. It’s a feedback loop, like any natural system.

2. Listen to what animals have to say. In dreams, our job is to listen, and to facilitate their needs. Sick animals need attention, and hungry animals need food. Angry and violent animals need to be calmed… remember that the ability to establish order is humanity’s gift to the natural world.

3. Map your dreams! Many of the locales we go to in our dreams are relatively constant (depending on your dreaming style). We take this “psychogeography” with us in waking life too, adding levels of depth to our home environment — and sometimes muddying the waters with our personal past. Noticing this can clarify how we react to new situations and ease tension when out of our element.  Innovative dreamworker Jennifer Dumpert, a scholar at Pacifica Graduate Institute, teaches a method for directing our natural ability to “dream map” where we live.

4. Share your apocalyptic dreams.  This is a rich area of discussion, because so many of us have apocalyptic dreams but do not share them publicly. Sometimes sharing a dream can alleviate its “big-ness” – because sometimes our apocalyptic dreams are reflective of our personal changes in life. But other times they contain information for our community. We can only act once we find out that others in our community have had similar dreams that brings a potential danger to our attention. Especially helpful if you live under an active volcano.

5. Honor the dream with ritual.  If you dream of a local place that needs some love, stop by and make contact.  Or read the paper to see if the land is currently under threat of development.  Give thanks to the eagle, and bow to the ocean.  I live in California, so of course I have to extol the virtues of hugging a tree.  Seriously, go hug a tree.

I recommend complementing this dream practice with a regular nature practice too.

So what have I forgotten? How do dreams and nature connect in your life?

The next post in this series about how to work with dreams is about how to start a dream sharing group.

However, the “dreams we remember for the rest of our life” are not the Big Dreams that contemporary dream researchers have demarked, but rather a watered down “catch-all” category that is based on the dreaming public’s perceived importance of particular dreams, rather than a set of features and characteristics unique to the experiences themselves.

Some researchers claim that Big Dreams come from different kinds of cognition than the typical REM dream. These typical dreams are the bread and butter of our dream life: chaotic stories, funny pairings of people from the past with situations of the present, anxiety dreams, etc. These “little” dreams are largely drawn from our personal past and tend to be loosely put together. We use narrative and story to help structure these experiences so we can talk about them.

Features of Archetypal Dreams

Big Dreams, also known as archetypal dreams, seem to be cut from a different cloth. Most importantly, they feel more real than real life, and a strong “felt meaning” is experienced in the moment. I think some visitation dreams definitely fit this description. But the other categories really set Big Dreams apart from ordinary dreams.

The most common elements are:

• abstract geometric patterns and kaleidoscopic mandalas,
• the experience of flying, floating or falling,
• encounters with mythological creatures and strange, intelligent animals
• feeling awe, fascination, fear and terror, and a sense of “Other”

Unlike ordinary dreams, these dreams are not easily picked at with standard dream interpretation procedures like psychoanalysis because very little personal history is encoded in these larger-than-life experiences. Archetypal dreams also have a consistency unmatched by ordinary dreams; in other words, their structure is cleanly focused, and the delivery to consciousness resembles waking visions of shamans and saints more than other nocturnal dreams.

Carl Jung and Big Dreams

The term “Big Dreams” came from Carl Jung, who seemed to dream in an archetypal way much of the time. But he made the distinction after visiting an East African tribe in Kenya, the Elgoni, in 1925. According to Jung, the Elgoni have a strong dreaming culture (80 years ago anyways – they have been successful at staying out of the eye of Sauron for many years since). They explained to Jung that there are little dreams and big dreams. For the Elgoni, big dreams were seen as collective dreams. The dreamer was dreaming for the community, for the landscape, and perhaps for all of the world.

This shamanic style of dreaming matched well with Jung’s own experience, and it gave him further insight into his theories of the collective unconscious (as a side note, later in life, Jung revised his earlier essays about the collective unconscious and moved away from theories dealing with “racial memory”, instead framing these shared experiences in a way that is more parsimonious with today’s evolutionary psychology: as bodily expressions transformed metaphorically into cognitive symbols that all humans share due to our common biological heritage.)

Archetypal Dreams and Mysticism

Consciousness researcher Harry Hunt has studied archetypal dream for 20 years, and has done more than anyone in helping re-frame these experiences in light of cognitive psychology as well as the world’s mystical traditions.

He notes in the Multiplicity of Dreams:

“The archetypal dreams of long-term meditators and other highly intuitive subjects, with their geometric (mandala) designs and forms of luminosity, convey an ineffable portent that when articulated sounds metaphysical and spiritual. These are more abstract levels of imagistic self-reference, based on structurally complex visual-kinesthetic synesthesias, with visual structures predominating. It is exceedingly difficult to see how such dreams could be based on the Freud/Foulkes model of translation from verbal-propositional thinking (p. 132).”

That’s a mouthful, and quoting Hunt is always dangerous because it makes me responsible for translating!  Hunt is suggesting that archetypal dreams may have a different process than little dreams; his main point being that these expressions and experiences are not linguistically based and may not be formed from personal memory sources either.

The Origin of Big Dreams

So where do big dreams come from” And could archetypal dreams ultimately originate from the same cognitive soup as little dreams” John Antrobus, a retired professor of psychology and sleep research from City College of New York, thinks this is the case. His research into big dreams focuses on the emotional intensity of REM dreams that occur in the last part of the night, or early morning. From a recent New York Times article:

Core body temperature rises gradually from its nadir in the middle of the night during slow-wave sleep, the least active brain state. As morning nears, subcortical brain activity tied to the circadian cycle increases. When these cycles coincide in the last and longest REM phase, the study found, the mind produces its most dramatic dreams. Dreams during this active period are more likely to be highly memorable, vivid, and experiential, what Dr. Antrobus calls “superdreams.”

“The brain is waking up,” Dr. Antrobus said in an interview. “It starts waking up long before you are fully awake.”

Keep in mind that, for Antrobus, big dreams mean “memorable dreams,” and are not necessarily full of the archetypal elements that Jung and Hunt have described. Here, the emotional intensity of Antrobus’s “super-dreams” is the connecting thread. Perhaps the uncanny emotional level is one component that merges with the other, more complex, visual metaphors that comprise the unique characteristics of archetypal dreams.

This intense emotional element is also studied in the sociology of religion, in particular Rudolf Otto’s mysterium tremendum, which he described as the basic of mystical thought.

Archetypal Dreams & Ecopsychology

Returning to the shamanic Big Dreams of the Elgoni, perhaps these intense experiences with “Other” reveal communication with the larger-than-human community through our personal mythic and metaphoric artifacts of dreaming. Those half-human/half-animal dream figures seem to have their own agendas – as such they could be seen as expressions of our connectivity to our present ecological community.

It’s no wonder Westerners describe horrific dream visions as well as benign, given our disconnect from the natural world and our techno-industrial assault on the living fabric of life itself.

Even without assigning “inter-species communication” or “Gaia consciousness” it seems plain that we are resistant to ecological information (and other collective levels of suffering) that comes through our dreams.

That’s definitely one of my strong biases – that ecopsychology (the study of our minds in relation to our environment) has the most inclusive way of looking at our behaviors, our emotions, and our visionary states. From here, we can frame Big Dreams as evidence for a “collective unconscious” that is not rooted in the distant past (or phlyogenic memory) but instead that bubbles up from the present moment, from our present relationship to the Others in our lives.

Ultimately, I wonder: does the world dream through us” And even if this is only a metaphor for our personal and communal journeys through life, how can we learn to listen?

Today, the day after the full moon, I looked back into the research on the Moon’s Effect on Dreams done by the College of Metaphysics in Missouri. When I first blogged about their lucid dreaming and moon proposal this past February, I was skeptical because the research program did not seem to have any experimental controls in place.

Turns out my hesitancy was unfounded, as Dr. Barbara Condron did indeed set up a control group of dreamers who were tracking their dreams without knowing about her interest in the moon cycle’s effect on their recall or levels of lucidity.

Condron has published the results of this study, but it is only available for download on the College of Metaphysics website. I hope the study is also submitted to peer-review sometime soon. Unfortunately, Condron did not make publicly available the data contrasting the control group (those participants who did not know the dream recall study was tied to the moon’s phases) and the experimental group.

However, Condron did publish the second chapter of her e-book for free, and some of her results are discussed. Here’s a taste of some of their findings:

• More dreams were lucid during the full moon compared to the new moon.
• Dreamers reported more multiple dreams during the full moon.
• Lucidity during the full moon was less fractured and lasted longer than the new moon.

What remains to be seen is if higher lucidity rates can be demonstrated independently of the expectancy effect. In other words, are we more lucid during the full moon due solely to the cultural stories and mythologies that the full moon is a time of greater awareness, creativity, and madness?

So, here’s a great way to research how the moon’s cycles effect our dreams. Check out Erin Langley’s site: dream-people.net. This is a database that is open to the public once you register. The site allows you to code your dreams into certain categories, mostly “ancient” categories that have been arguably constant for humans for thousands of years. Examples include: dreams of ancestors, of rocks, plants, the moon, magical objects, certain animals, etc. The information is then cross-referenced against the date of the dream and, of course, the moon calender.

Not only can you input your own dreams here and track changes throughout the months and seasons, but you can search the categories and get raw data for how many dream reports in the entire database included that particular element, the associated moon position, as well as the astrological chart.

I especially like Langley’s guidelines for the site, so I”m going to post them here:

1. Keep part of the dream for yourself in order to protect yourself and retain your power. Trust your instinct about what to share and what not to share.
2. Honor the spirit of the dream. Do not dissipate its power through nonchalance or verbal analysis.
3. Respect the privacy of other dreamers. Do not read others” dreams voyeuristically. Dream sharing is an exchange.
4. Acknowledge your “big dreams” by making offerings those who have come to you. Make art, give a traditional offering from your culture, or say thank you another way.
5. Give your dreams time to unfold. Do not expect immediate understanding. Dreams can take years to unfold.
6. Heed your dreams in waking life. Take action when appropriate.
7. Recognize elements of your dreams that show up in waking life so that these two aspects of life become more seamless.
8. Learn the folktales and stories of your indigenous ancestors. Our dreaming and waking lives can tell us what histories we are enacting if we know our cultural stories and symbols.
9. If you have a dream for another person, share it with him or her when appropriate. Do not be attached to the result of this sharing.
10. Maintain respect for who or what you encounter in a lucid dream or out-of-body experience. The dream world is the real world.

If you have experiences with how the moon effects your dreams, feel free to share your story on my earlier post about full moon dreaming.

Studies on this subject are hard to find, but almost everyone has an opinion. So I am asking my readers to chime in with their opinions, perspective and stories on this ancient question.

The expectancy effect is often to blame for the lack of scientific consensus about whether the full moon could cause our dreams to be more memorable, more bizarre, or even downright magical.

Of course, we can quickly turn that around to suggest that it is very easy for us to use the moon’s patterns to incubate and remember our dreams. The great night-light in the sky has a historic association with witchcraft festivities, which are of course watered-down mis-perceptions of ancient shamanic practices which include dream incubation, soul-travel, and animal transformation.

So anyways, what will you dream about tomorrow night?

Image thanks to David Haworth

But there’s a lot going on in the consciousness studies community, and I am well poised now to share the latest news, trends, and happenings from my home beneath the redwood trees in Northern California.

For starters, the International Association for the Study of Dreams is hosting its annual conference in Montreal next week. I’ll be there, and I”m hoping to provide timely commentary as I tool around at the hundreds of presentations on everything from clinical research to anthropological narratives. I promised the same during the Anthropology of Consciousness Conference, but this time, I have a laptop that works.

I”m presenting as well, an ecopsychological critique of lucid dreaming and the method I”ve developed that addresses my own split from nature, focusing on receptivity and connectivity within the wilderness of the lucid dream.

I have big plans for the Dream Studies Portal in the next few months: a new look, new features, and more in-depth coverage of the dream studies community. If there’s anything you”d like to see more of (or less of), feel free to drop me a line.

The guide is a synthesis of different practices developed by psychologist Eugene Gendlin, naturalist Jon Young, and archaeologist Paul Devereux. I brought the practices together when studying the perceptual effects of ancient rock art in Nicaragua. It really works well for me so I want to share it.

Although I call this method nature observation, it is really about coming back to our senses and remembering who we are. Humans belong in nature and it does not take long to redevelop our connections to the natural world.

Yeah, we live in a fractured, mechanized, soul-stabbing world and to cope we have lots of barriers to prevent ourselves from feeling connected. But we also have intuitive abilities that have been tempered by hundreds of thousands of years of participation in the real world.

Waking back up to the senses can be painful at times. Just like when your leg “falls asleep,” the first sensations from the blood circulating again are often pinpricks of pain. I have found that working through this pain, which ecopsychologist Chellis Glendinning calls eco-trauma, is an important first step to reconnecting with our forgotten intuitive abilities. But facing what need to be faced is not so scary in the end; what happens when we don’t face it is the real nightmare!

Now that I”ve turned everyone off from ever going outside again, I”m going to close with an old song that sums up this whole process:

Stop children, what’s that sound? Everyone look what’s going down.

Jennifer Dumpert and associates discuss their participation in on-going group dreaming projects with an emphasis on how dreams and waking life meet through the perception of landscape and cityscape. It’s part slumber party, part experiential research, and sounds like a lot of fun.

Psychogeography is the concept behind this project – the study of consciousness in relationship to place. What began as an architectural movement in the 1950s has become an interdisciplinary adventure, influencing modern art, ecopsychology, cognitive archaeology, and, of course, experiential dream research.

If you”re interested in how psychogeography intersects with dreams and sacred sites, a great starting place is Stanley Krippner and Paul Devereux’s work with megalithic sites in England and Wales.

There’s always a danger of projecting our ideas about dreams into the past, especially the deep past, but as archaeologist David Lewis-Williams has reminded, humans cannot refrain from dreaming. I take this a step further and suggest that our ancient ancestors were quite capable of incubating visionary states within their dreams.

Click here to read: The Prehistory of Lucid Dreaming.