Dream Visions

Creative Dreaming | Blog Your Blessings

When I started working with dreams, years ago, Patricia Garfield was one of the two best authors on dreamwork that I found. She is a clinical psychologist who also works with her own dreams.

Currently I’m reading the second edition of her book, Creative Dreaming, and I highly recommend it.

Garfield’s books are different from those of Robert Moss (Conscious Dreaming, Dreamgates, and Dreaming True). She spends a bit more time explaining the research that has been done on dreams and the methods that she recommends for getting/shaping the dreams you want.

She writes very clearly and simply, so her books are fun to read and easy to understand. I also think that she is a bit more detailed in explaining how to work with dreams. So it seems easier to understand her methods and put them into practice.

Garfield gives great practical advice on transforming nightmares into pleasant dreams. She also has a lot of interesting information on how to use dreams to get answers. And she devotes a whole chapter to Native American beliefs about dreams and visions, and what we can learn from their methods.

This is a great book, and I’ll probably write more about it later. Meanwhile, give it a try, and let me know how it works for you.

Creative Dreaming was published several years ago, so you should be able to find it in the library. You can definitely find it on Amazon, where I got mine.

Sorry I haven’t blogged for awhile. I got a new job—but with a long commute. Then I got sick. I’ll get back on schedule with blogging as soon as I can.

Meanwhile, I feel really blessed to have a great job, working with fun people.

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Do You Have Lucid Dreams?

Until Steven Laberge popularized the term with his book Lucid Dreaming in the 1980s, I don’t think very many people had ever heard of lucid dreams. That didn’t mean people weren’t having them. They just weren’t using the term lucid dream.

Ancient texts describe lucid dreams and methods for having them. And many of us had had them without knowing what they were. If you have ever become concious, during a dream, that you were dreaming, even for a second, you have had a lucid dream.

Becoming lucid, at least for the moment it takes to realize you’re dreaming, seems to be an escape mechanism. If you’re having a nightmare, it allows you to stop the dream or move on to a less scary one. That has been my experence since childhood, but it has been rare.

I knew a girl in junior high school who could dream of going out with any boy she fancied. That was long before the best-selling book came out, and it was the first time I had heard of anyone controlling dreams.

In a comment on another post on this blog, Tony Hogan mentioned trying to remember to look at the backs of your hands in dreams to become lucid. That’s the method Carlos Castaneda described in the Don Juan novels, and I’ve often wondered where he got it, or if he really used it himself. I’ve heard people say that they have tried it, but not with much success.

In his book, Conscious Dreaming, Robert Moss describes a different method for lucid dreaming, and I think it sounds more promising. We’ll talk about that, and the Tibetan method, another time.

What I’d like to know is this: Have you had lucid dreams? What were they like?

Did you deliberately induce them? If so, how did you get started?

Or did they just happen? Were you able to control them? What did you do? Where did you go?