Connect with rich soul material in your dreams

Today, two bloggers mention Thomas Moore's latest column in Spirituality and Health magazine. In the January-February 2010 issue, he writes about developing a dream practice. Cassie Premo Steele quotes Moore in her post, "Synchronicity, Cycles, and the Power of the Wish":

"The fundamental point in developing a dream practice is to live from a deep place and to connect the rich, profound life of the soul with ordinary activity. You live, then, in many dimensions and are closer to the roots of your emotions and thoughts and the patterns that define your life... With your dreams, you, too, are looking for the poetics of your own underworld."

Dr. Donna Cox reflects on the role of dreams in her post, "Dreaming or hearing from God?". She writes, "What I do know is how many times God has used dreams in my life. Often my dreams have been prophetic, warning me that one of my children needed prayer, that there were demonic forces working in certain relationships or that I needed to open my eyes and heart to issues I would rather avoid... As a result of reading Moore’s short piece, I decided to see what I could find on the web about Christian dream interpretation." Cox includes a .pdf download in her post.

Montana gathering learns about living dreams

Prairie Mary (Mary Scriver) writes about a Thomas Moore dream lesson at a conference in Montana during 1983, "Logon '83: A Seed That Grew". At the gathering, two boys, who hadn’t paid to attend, shared a dream for interpretation. According to Scriver,

"Thomas Moore carefully and kindly guided them through free association: what snakes were there in their lives? What did the highway mean to them? As this whole new world opened up to these boys, their mouths hung open in astonishment. Others among us smiled smugly. Then the door burst open and in came the female registrar on the prod. She gave those two boys the hook -- they were outta there in a hurry -- and the class was aghast! We were all liberals, tolerant, inclusive, and so on.

So then Thomas Moore treated the occasion as if it were a dream. It DID have its surreal elements, so sudden and such a change in mood. What did we think of when we considered authority figures? What does it mean to limit a group? (There’s a whole body of scholarly comment on “fencing the Communion,” which the early Christians did -- only allowing baptized people to take the bread and wine.)

All of a sudden we realized that EVERYTHING is metaphorical, everything has both a personal history and a larger history plus relationship to old and deep patterning. And that much of the work of consciousness is bringing up some of that while maybe suppressing other elements we’re not ready to handle."

Prairie Mary is a member of Barque: Thomas Moore Forum and invites readers to consider a recent post in which she interprets Tiger Woods' accident as a dream.

Night terrier, or night terror, not nightmare

Today, Mary Strachan Scriver posts "The Night Terrier", describing a Montana get together hosted by Michael and Linda Sexson in the 1980s, attended by Thomas Moore:

"People were PASSIONATE! Far from cool techies! Thomas Moore was there to explain how computers tapped into our human way of making inanimate objects into something human: ventriloquists’ dummies (the computer as Mortimer Snerd), Pinocchio (the computer as liar), and oracles (futurism). They weren’t tools, they were relationships!"

Then she describes a recent dream in which Moore appeared:

"Thomas Moore would listen to all this very carefully and then begin to ask me to free-associate. He’s from the James Hillman school of thought: nothing is too sacred to reflect upon because all of life is sacred, but sacrality doesn’t necessarily mean institutional dogma."