The Kabbalah of Light by Catherine Shainberg - Biogeografia (2024)

Prévia do material em texto

To my students past and future Without whom I would be muteTHE KABBALAH OF LIGHT“Catherine’s done it again, assembling the hidden ingredients ofmindfulness and brewing them in a cauldron of ancient and earlymedieval Hebraic mystery wisdom. An excellent guide whosemagic we have yet to fathom and of which, through the book’smany exercises, we might finally catch a glimpse.”RABBI GERSHON WINKLER, AUTHOR OF MAGIC OF THE ORDINARY“Catherine Shainberg’s new book is serious, delightful, and tingedwith the magical, as is the author. It is a creative effort, filled withwonderful practices and exercises to raise the great Leviathan fromthe depths of the unconscious so as to awaken our creativeimagination and life force. Shainberg’s readings into biblical andKabbalistic myth are wonderfully creative.”MELILA HELLNER-ESHED, AUTHOR OF A RIVER FLOWS FROM EDEN“The Kabbalah of Light is an audacious endeavor to present theesoteric wisdom of the Jewish mystical tradition as the science ofletting the unconscious speak. The guidance in this book is to leadone to spiritual enlightenment and psychic well-being, theexperience that Kabbalists call dveikut, cleaving to the divine, thehighest rung on the ladder of dreams.”ELLIOT WOLFSON, MARSHA AND JAY GLAZER CHAIR IN JEWISHSTUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA“In this brilliant book, Catherine has given us a great gift. Not onlyis this work dazzling in its depth and beauty, it is also eminentlyuseful and practical. Catherine guides us on a grand journey, avoyage of self-discovery. There lies buried treasure—the riches of amore fulfilling transformed life, illumined by the golden sunlight ofdivine revelation.”KEVIN MELVILLE JENNINGS, PAST CONTRIBUTOR OF THE DAILYSCOPE FOR VOGUE.COM“In her thrilling new book, Catherine Shainberg’s treasure trove ofplayful and profound ‘inductions’ will guide you to plunge deeperand deeper into the innermost realms of your soul. What a gift thisbook is to all seekers of light and delight. The Kabbalah of Light ismind-expanding. It’s fun and fabulous!”DIDI CONN, ACTRESS AND PLAYWRIGHTContentsPrefaceIntroductionPart I. The Leviathan, Great Beast of theDeep: Fishing in the Ocean of theSubconsciousChapter 1. The Mystery of DreamsChapter 2. Tikun and a Ladder to the LightChapter 3. Incubation and Saphire ImageryChapter 4. The Creative ActChapter 5. Signs of Transformation: The Grammar of the ImaginationChapter 6. Symbol or MetaphorPART II. Taming the Leviathan: Interactionswith the SubconsciousChapter 7. Playing with ManifestationChapter 8. Dreamfields and ComplexesChapter 9. Ancestral PatternsChapter 10. The Inner Child: From Duality to SingularityChapter 11. Misery and Splendor: Restoring RelationshipsChapter 12. Time and ChoiceChapter 13. Healing: Will It Be Leprosy, Wellness, or Wholeness?PART III. Raising the Leviathan: The Serpentof the Deep, Your Superconsciousness or, asthe French Like to Call It, Your Sur-natureChapter 14. The Heart-Centered WayChapter 15. Prayer and the LeviathanGlossaryEndnotesBibliographyLearn MoreIndexList of ExercisesPART IThe Leviathan, Great Beast of the Deep1 The Mystery of DreamsExercise 1. Awake while Falling AsleepExercise 2. Looking into Your BodyExercise 3. Enter Your ThumbExercise 4. Adrenal Rainbow2 Tikun and a Ladder to the LightExercise 5. The Drop of BloodExercise 6. The GrailExercise 7. Protection in a NightmareExercise 8. Responding to the Necessity of RepetitiveDreamsExercise 9. Clearing Busy Dreams3 Incubation and Saphire ImageryExercise 10. The Question BannerExercise 11. The Flying ArrowExercise 12. Asking a Question of Your DreamExercise 13. Timing Your AnswerExercise 14. The Dream CatcherExercise 15. HaShem YirehExercise 16. The Zen KoanExercise 17. The Key to a LockExercise 18. Losing Your HeadExercise 19. The Flying CarpetExercise Class: From Twilight to the RainbowExercise 20. The Two Angels4 The Creative ActExercise 21. Talking to Your BodyExercise 22. Mirror Left and RightExercise 23. Sweep to the LeftExercise 24. The Switch SignExercise 25. Lucid DreamingExercise 26. Un-focusing the EyesExercise 27. The Angel of JusticeExercise 28. Telescoping Tree5 Signs of Transformation: The Grammar of the ImaginationExercise 29. A Waking DreamExercise 30. A Chair, a ThroneExercise 31. The Waterfall (Formal)Exercise 32. Breathing with the Tree (Formal)Exercise 33. Emotional Attractors of TimeExercise 34. The Desert Turns Green6 Symbol or MetaphorExercise 35. Stepping Into Someone Else’s ShoesExercise 36. Becoming the Creatures in the GardenExercise 37. Getting Past the Angel Guarding EdenPART IITaming the Leviathan7 Playing with ManifestationExercise 38. Getting Rid of Fears, Doubts, and WorriesExercise 39. The Value of WorthExercise 40. Bull’s-EyeExercise 41. Goodbye, Regrets and GuiltExercise 42. DeadlineExercise 43. Little DevilsExercise 44. The WalkExercise 45. The Solar Plexus (Formal)8 Dreamfields and ComplexesExercise 46. Repetitive MovementsExercise 47. Symptom ClearingExercise 48. The Pathways of EmotionExercise 49. Switching from Emotions to FeelingExercise 50. The Four Stages of DevelopmentExercise 51. GroundingExercise 52. Listening to the BodyExercise 53. Snow WhiteExercise 54. Switching RolesExercise 55. Shape-ShiftingExercise 56. BouldersExercise 57. The Golden KeyExercise 58. Interweaving9 Ancestral PatternsExercise 59. Name PatternsExercise 60. Family PlacementExercise 61. Family DatesExercise 62. Repairing the Ancestral GardenExercise 63. The Cylindrical Mirror (Formal)Exercise 64. The Family TapestryExercise 65. Clearing Ancestral TraumaExercise 66. The Golden BroomExercise 67. Choosing Ancestral GiftsExercise 68. The Ancestral TreeExercise 69. The First Candle10 The Inner Child: From Duality to SingularityExercise 70. Eye OpeningExercise 71. Ear OpeningExercise 72. Nose OpeningExercise 73. Tongue OpeningExercise 74. Skin OpeningExercise 75. Rescuing the Suffering ChildExercise 76. Healing the Wounded SelfExercise 77. Stories We Tell OurselvesExercise 78. AcceptanceExercise 79. The Devastated CityExercise 80. Ocean of TearsExercise 81. The Three Wise KingsExercise 82. Honoring Your ParentExercise 83. Heroic MeasuresExercise 84. Taking Your Parents Out of Your BodyExercise 85. Emotions and FeelingsExercise 86. Renewed EnergyExercise 87. Stop One MinuteExercise 88. Shepherd Gathers His FlockExercise 89. Bikkurim, the Premises or First FruitExercise 90. Joy, the Hidden Marvel11 Misery and Splendor: Restoring RelationshipsExercise 91. I-It and I-ThouExercise 92. YearningsExercise 93. Cup the CheekExercise 94. Carrying BackExercise 95. King David and AbigailExercise 96. Back-to-BackExercise 97. Face-to-FaceExercise 98. Alien FiresExercise 99. Remember LoveExercise 100. Fear of LovingExercise 101. Like Attracts LikeExercise 102. The Scrub Wheel (Formal)Exercise 103. Calling Your Soul MateExercise 104. Taming the Wild DeerExercise 105. The Blue PillowExercise 106. The BridgeExercise 107. Eyes and Oneness12 Time and ChoiceExercise 108. The Continuum Space-Time StoryExercise 109. River of TimeExercise 110. The Time of TreesExercise 111. Breaking Clock Time AddictionExercise 112. DirectionalityExercise 113. ReversingExercise 114. Cyclical TimeExercise 115. Clearing ChronophobiaExercise 116. The Serene HoursExercise 117. The Origami FlowerExercise 118. 360-Degree VisionExercise 119. Vertical TimeExercise 120. The Sun DropExercise 121. Love Conquers Space-TimeExercise 122. Wake-Up TimeExercise 123. Anticipate Clock TimeExercise 124. Collapsing Space-Time13 Healing: Will It Be Leprosy, Wellness, or Wholeness?Exercise 125. Drop Your ClothesExercise 126. Cutting a LemonExercise 127. The Whiteis dark. And yet, each time youturn your eyes inward, light goes on and forms appear. The Kabbalists callthis light the “light of creation” to differentiate it from the light of the sun.They say that God created with this light, but that it was too strong for thevessels that held it, and they shattered. (So,) Then He created the sun andstars‡ 28 to channel the light so that we could be shielded from his nakedlight and not be destroyed. It is said that only Moses, the greatest of biblicalprophets, had a clear mirror reflecting the pure light of God. We are notMoses, but our work is to slowly acclimatize our eyes to the true light. Westart with one sixtieth of this light,5 the light that we create, like God, bylooking into the darkness. Think of it: Each time you turn your eyes inward,you create more light. Of course, unless you consciously pay attention to itsappearance, that light won’t stay. If, on the contrary, you make turninginward a conscious practice, the more you look in and create light, the morelight coalesces within you. I am talking of a very practical concretetechnology of creating light and becoming in effect “enlightened.”Dreaming is not only one of the great paths to enlightenment, it is yourpath to manifestation. God looks into the chaos and creates light, and out ofthis light, forms emerge. Adam is taught to do the same as God. He calls outthe names of the animals, and the animals appear. If you want to learn tomanifest, you must call for what you want. But what if you don’t knowwhat you want? Abraham heard the voice saying, “Go!” But he didn’t knowwhere he wanted to go. He did know that he and Sarah, his wife, werebarren and so far hadn’t been able to create “something.” If you call forcreativity, turning your eyes inward to create the light, the light will takeform, and you will be shown the form your creativity is meant to take.The subconscious is mute. It will only “speak” to the one who asks aquestion, in the same way that you can’t access a computer program untilyou click on it. If I’m anxiously awaiting news about publishers, and thisquestion is foremost in my mind, my subconscious will happily produce aresponse.I dream that I am in an Egyptian tomb, and that the walls arecovered with repetitive paintings of the god Anubis grinning atme. All of the Anubis figures are holding my book in the crookof their arm, pointing to it with the index finger of their otherhand.The next morning, I checked which publisher sported the Anubis logo.It was Inner Traditions. I called my agent and dear friend Jane Lahr andsaid, “I dreamt last night that Inner Traditions would publish my book. Canyou contact them?” Following the dream brings manifestation: In 2005Inner Traditions became the publisher of Kabbalah and the Power ofDreaming.We all dream, whether we like it or not. But are we conscious of ourquestions and anxieties? Most of us are not, which doesn’t stop the dreamsfrom popping up. Dreams will respond to an anxiety, a need for clarity, aworry about the past or the future, or what is happening in our life just now,or simply “protests from various parts of our bodies that the conductor isnot managing the orchestra well.” Our pains, anxieties, or longings callforth our night dreams. As we sleep, we hover over the great chaos ofimages and experiences that is the caldron of our subconscious. Ourquestions call forth an answer, which is our dream. Mirrors show us ourreversed selves. In the same way the dream doesn’t show us our everydayreality, but a different, “reversed” version of it. The great law of attractionsays that like attracts its mirror image. One of the many errors people makeis that they think they can force the subconscious to give them what theself-conscious ego wants. We cannot become a millionaire simply becauseour ego wants it. If we ask our subconscious about becoming a millionaireand it shows us a tent instead of a palace, we know we were not meant tobecome a millionaire. It is not in our DreamField. We cannot force ourdreams to produce what we want. But we can ask our dreams to give formto our longing. “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of us all?”And the dreaming answers the truth, “Snow White is more beautiful.” It isnot your vanity that is beautiful, but your snow-white soul, says thedreaming mirror to our inner stepmother. We might not like what we seeand hear in our dreaming, but the subconscious can only show us the truth.In the Hebrew language dream is called halom; the consonants H L Mare the root of the word.*29 Imagine these three consonants as the roots of agreat tree. As the tree grows, each blossom unfurls a different word, alwaysusing the same three consonants. A different permutation of letters, such aslehem, L H M, creates a different meaning, but one that is neverthelessconnected by the same letters. Lehem means “bread.” What is commonbetween dream and bread? You must throw a little yeast in the dough tomake the bread rise, and then you put it in the oven. With the dream, yourquestion is the yeast, and your body is the oven or crucible. The questioncalls forth the different ingredients of the dream that are mixed together andbaked in the oven of your sleeping body. When you awaken, your dream iscooked! Dream and bread have in common that they both rise.By asking a question, you have begun the dialogue with your dreams.Dreams are forms of communication. When you understand this, you willrealize the great power you have. You can “incubate” a dream by asking aspecific question; think of it as fishing. You load your hook with juicy baitand throw your line into the ocean. The right fish for the bait will emerge toswallow the hook. Through your question you stir up the subconscious.Further along we will discuss the process of dream incubation, but let’s notget ahead of ourselves.The first question should be: Do you remember your dreams? If youdon’t—or even if you sometimes do—you must evince the desire toremember them. Most people find dreams intriguing, so that should helpyou. It is all in the intent. People often say to me, How can I work with youwhen I don’t remember my dreams? I always answer: Bring me a dreamnext week. They invariably rise to the challenge and have a dream to showme when they next come to see me.I hope I have said enough to intrigue you, and that you are willing to puta bit of time and effort into remembering your dreams. The first thing youmust do is prove to your subconscious that you are serious about wanting toremember your dreams. Do this by getting a DreamBook. Find a journalwhose cover or paper is aesthetically pleasing to you. On the first page,write “DreamBook.” On the second page write tonight’s date. Leave thebook open on your night table with a pen beside it. You have manifestedyour intention to remember your dreams.If during that first week your intent is strong, you may find yourselfwaking up a few times during the night remembering fragments of yourdreams. Write them down in your DreamBook. As you become accustomedto remembering your dreams, your deep sleep will return, and you will notbe troubled with waking up during the night. If you are healthy and vibrantand don’t take sleeping pills, you will easily learn to remember yourdreams. You need a good flow of hormones to dream. This is why dreamrecall is stronger in children and younger people, and especially strong inpregnant women. My Chinese doctor calls the hormone pills he gives hisolder women patients “dream pills.” If your dream recall is still difficult, trythis ancient Tibetan practice: Imagine a small ball of bright red light, andput it into your thyroid*30 before falling asleep. Or you can massage youradrenal glands,†31 in your mind’s eye with the following exercise.Exercise 4Adrenal RainbowBreathe out three times slowly, counting from three to one.See the one tall, clear, and bright.See a rainbow in the skyafter a rainfall.Breathe out. Stretch your arms out toward the rainbow;see them elongating and elongating. With both hands, grabthe rainbow and bring it into your body to place over your twoadrenal glands.Breathe out. See your two adrenal glands becoming onewide band of colors.Breathe out. Sense the flow of hormones from the band ofcolors streaming through your whole body as colored light.What color do you see? How does your body feel now?Breathe out. Open your eyes.We have four periods of REM at night, each period longer than the lastas morning approaches. As you approach consciousness, your self-conscious mind starts interacting with your subconscious mind and puttingsome order into the chaos of images that arise. Your dreams are aninteraction between the subconscious and the conscious mind. The sub-conscious throws up a jumble of images, and the conscious mind arrangesthem into some semblance of order. When we awaken, what we rememberis a sequence of images. This sequence may not appear to be logical butdoes have some kind of story line. That is what you will write down in yourDreamBook. Your morning dreams are more important than your dreams ofthe middle of the night, because this interaction is more active.Memories are in the body. This is why you should remain in the sameposition you slept in as you wake up. If you move, the dream is likely todisappear. If it does, simply return to your original position. Keep yourmind empty of all thoughts, and remain still. If the dream doesn’t resurfacein a minute or two, create a clear space in the back of your mind, areceptive emptiness. Dream fragments or the whole dream may reappear asyou stand under your shower, or at some unexpected moment during theday when your mind is relaxed. Welcome them, and quickly write themdown in your DreamBook. By doing so, you are telling your sub-consciousthat you are attentively listening and wanting to hear more.You are the fisherman. You have thrown in your bait. Now sit, wait,watch, and listen. If you catch a golden fish in your line and net, when itbegs for its life, don’t drop it back in the sea like the old fisherman did inAlexander Pushkin’s fairy tale.6 Ask it to reveal to you the powers that arehidden in the subconscious. What does your dream mean? What is it tryingto tell you? “Dreams not interpreted are like unopened letters,”7 warn theTalmudic sages.*32 Perceval, a legendary knight of King Arthur’s RoundTable known for his “good boy” acquiescence, when shown the Holy Grailin a vision doesn’t ask, What does this mean? For this he is sent back to thebeginning and must, through hard labors of the soul, reacquire his right tobe shown the source he disrespected in his first vision. You will be givendreams. Your work is to ponder and decipher them. But don’t worry, there isa way in.Here is a Talmudic story that will guide you in.Four rabbis decide to visit the Garden of Eden. They enter into a state ofintense meditation and ascend to the Garden. The first rabbi, Ben Azzai,gazes and dies. The second, Ben Zoma, gazes and goes mad. The third,Elishya ben Abuyah, named Aher (other), gazes and loses his faith. OnlyRabbi Akiva enters in peace and leaves in peace.8In Hebrew, the Garden is called PRDS,*33 pronounced “PaRDeS,”which is the origin of the word paradise in English. Each letter representsone of the steps to deciphering the meaning of your dream:P stands for P’shat, the story line.R stands for Remez, the pattern.D stands for Drash, the question.S stands for Sod, the secret or treasure.Do not worry. The death, madness, and heresy of the three rabbis are whatcould happen if you were to remain stuck on one of the three levels, but youwon’t. Think of your search for the meaning of your dream as setting out ona treasure hunt. You don’t want to get caught on the surface level of thestory (P). The glittery reflections are just an illusion. You don’t want to beseduced into playing with patterns (R). Patterns are useful to sort out thestory line, but if you stay there, they become food for gossip (this one isconnected to that one because they both wear the same T-shirt, and that oneis connected to the second one because their T-shirts are pink!). Askingwhat all this means is fine, but beginning to doubt that this means anythingat all (D) is not. Keep your eyes steadily affixed to your goal, the secret ortreasure (S) you seek, and you will be able to avoid the three dangers onyour way to the truth.Not all dreams are the same. Some dreams are clues to the next part ofyour life’s journey. Other dreams fall straight into the source, and like thehero Perceval, you are given a glimpse of the treasure. But like him youmay not be able to grasp it. We will examine what the different kinds ofdreams are in the next chapter and how they fit into a rising ladder ofdreaming that leads to enlightenment. First we must accustom ourselves torecognizing the story line, the pattern, and the main question of the dream.If we succeed, the golden fish or secret treasure will jump. This is what iscalled revelation. Revelation brings greater clarity and power. The dreamerwill be shown what the next step is.Dreams always talk to us about Now. They are not interested in the past.They only go to the past to clear out knots and entanglements that block theflow of dreaming. In fact, in dreaming, there is no past or future. Dreamingis always in the now. What I see is what is. I can only see one thing at atime. The knot from the past is here today, and that is what the dream showsme. It gives me the opportunity to undo the knot and to clear theDreamField. Night dreams are there to help you to do just that. Spending alittle time writing them down and then trying to untie them is immenselyworthwhile. It is your Ariadna’s golden thread.*34 Opening your dreamsleads you eventually to the source, the Holy Grail, the paradise we all—albeit unconsciously—search for. DreamOpening®†35 is the gateway to thehappiness, joy, health, and abundance we are all longing to obtain here onthis Earth.Before we begin the process of what I call DreamOpening, let’sestablish ground rules. The dreamer is precious. The dreamer intuitivelyknows what rings true to their soul. We must respect the dreamer andrecognize that we are not interpreting their dream or dictating to them whatthe dream means. We are opening it up to its different facets. “There weretwenty-four interpreters of dreams in Jerusalem. Once I dreamed a dreamand went around to all of them, and they all gave me differentinterpretations, and yet all were fulfilled.”9 The dream is like a diamond.Each interpreter will illuminate a facet of the diamond, but none alone willmaster its whole meaning. In the story of the golden fish, the fisherman’swife wanted to be the mistress of a better tub, a better home, then a palace,but when she asked to be mistress of the sea (read, mistress of thesubconscious) the golden fish swam away, and all her powers were lost.The old fisherman and his wife returned to their original poverty and werestripped of the golden abundance they had benefited from. You must neverkill the hen (or the fish) that lays the golden eggs. You will never knowscientifically or otherwise where wisdom comes from. You can only respectit, bow to it, and follow its advice as best you can.It is more enlightening to open a dream in a company of dreamers. Tendreamers is a good number. But you can open your dreams yourself, or witha dream companion. Choose your dream companion or company carefully.A dream companion should never look you in the eye when opening yourdream. They should say: “As the secondary dreamer of this dream, this iswhat I feel.” They should not unilaterally attempt to interpret the dream’strue meaning. By saying unequivocally this is what your dream means, theywould be imposing their point of view and fixing the dream. Always returnthe dream to the originaldreamer, asking what resonates for the dreamer,and respecting the dreamer’s understanding of their own dream. Dreams areopenings into the very delicate vulnerable movements of the psyche. Wemust tread carefully. The Talmud also says: “All dreams follow themouth.”10 This means that the way you choose to verbalize your openingwill affect the original dreamer. Always find a way to state the truth of whatyou see and understand in a way that is life affirming and can lead topositive outcomes. Never give a negative DreamOpening. Instead, alwayspursue the dream thread that leads towards goodness. In this way, youfollow the truth of the body that strives for balance and for life. Dreams areanother way your body communicates with you about survival. They warnus of dangers and may lead us through the valley of death, but they alwaysilluminate a way out. Even if the dreamer produces a nightmare in whichthey are killed, they awaken with the knowledge that they are in danger andmust do something about it. In chapter 2 we will discuss how the dreamercan respond to the necessity of their dream. Think of dreams as animportant part of your evolutionary process.To reach paradise, or at least the way to a greater harmony and peacewithin, let us examine how to work with the four levels of aDreamOpening.P’shat, the story lineDream sequences don’t appear to our consciousness as a bundle ofnonsense. They have a more or less understandable story line. Although thestory line might not make logical sense (one moment I am walking upsidedown up some spindly stairs going toward the sky, the next I am crouchingin a basement deep in the earth), it still appears as a linear progression.Write your dream as you remember seeing it. When you write your dreamdown in your DreamBook, avoid short cuts. You want your reader—yourdream companion or company—to be able to “see,” to follow in theirmind’s eye, the sequences of images that you describe.A man is walking down a street when he hears a truck’s tiresscreeching behind him.Can you see this image? What is missing in the description? What does theman look like? What kind of street? Is it day or night? How do you knowit’s a truck? What kind of truck? These questions could result in yourwriting your dream down as follows:I watch from the right sidewalk as a man in a black trenchcoat crosses to the left sidewalk. It is nighttime, and hedoesn’t see the approach of a white truck that suddenlybrakes to avoid hitting him. I hear the screeching of its tires.Describing in detail the images that you have experienced is adiscipline. It will teach you to become more precise and grounded in yourbody and in everyday life. For instance, it can help you to identify what youhave forgotten to explain to your friend, and is causing a nastymisunderstanding between you, or what is missing in an employee’s reportof an incident at work. Being precise in what you see and how youcommunicate what you see is a skill you will soon learn to value. We callthis aspect of the P’shat*36 level of DreamOpening clarification.The second part of the P’shat level of dream opening is day residue. Dayresidue is about finding out which part or parts of the dream belong toreality and which to dream material.I watch from the east sidewalk near my house at 73 FifthAvenue, as a man I don’t know, wearing a black trench coat,with a tag that says FREEDMAN on its back, is crossing tothe west sidewalk. It is night, and he doesn’t see theapproach of a white truck that speeds down Fifth Avenue fromnorth to south, and suddenly brakes to avoid hitting him. Ihear the screeching of its tires.My school is located at 73 Fifth Avenue, which makes this detail of thedream less impactful. It is not dream material, but material transposed frommy everyday reality into the dream. Freudians would call this detail “dayresidue” from everyday reality and would spend a lot of time identifyingwhy you brought this daytime residue into your dream. For us, “There canbe no dream which does not contain meaningless matter,”11 and residuefrom everyday reality has less to say about transformation than dreammaterial. Dream material is what your subconscious throws up from itsdepths when stimulated. It is in the plummeting into the subconscious andthe return to consciousness that transformation occurs. This is what we willfocus on.Remez, the pattern level of the dreamEvery story line has a pattern. We will note without judgment the patterns inour dreams. All we seek to do here is identify patterns; we are not yet tryingto understand.Pattern can be a map. The east, west, north, south orientations of the dreamare patterns that we note.Pattern can be opposites: man and woman (I am a woman). Black (coat)and white (truck); night and white truck.Pattern can be numbers: 73 is not a pattern, since it is the real number ofmy building. Nor is Fifth. But there are two people. Although the dreamdoesn’t mention the number two, it is implied.Pattern can be puns. Fifth Avenue is not a pun and doesn’t sound likesomething else. But Freedman does. Is the man touting his freedom?The language of forms works by analogy. It brings observed similaritiestogether in the mind: a cigar, a zucchini, and a penis all have similar shapes.They are not symbols of each other, as Freudians would say; they simplyhave similar oblong shapes. Shapes have function: a bowl receives, a knifecuts through. These two shapes are not analogous, they are opposites (interms of form). Physiologically, a man’s genitals are outside, a woman’sgenitals are inside her body. They fit together like puzzle pieces. Forexample, a basketball fits into the hoop. The ball is the positive space, thehoop its negative space. Remember that the language of dreaming is aboutforms. These forms can be commenting on different levels: physical,emotional, mental, and spiritual. The dream doesn’t make that distinction.It’s energy and light speaking in forms. In the emotional realm, a victimcalls forth its opposite, the tyrant. In the dream this could be illustrated bythe ball going into the hoop, or by a tyrant punching his victim, whocollapses inward. It’s still the same dynamic form: Something goes intosomething else. The pattern of movement counts, but we won’t knowwhether this is a physical or an emotional scenario or both. We must ask forthe emotional context of the dream. Another clue will be the dreamer’sresponse when we identify the pattern.Learning to read patterns will give you instant access to what is reallyhappening to your child when she comes home with a rambling story aboutclassmates and a lollipop one of them stole from her. If you can identify thepattern, you’re one step closer to figuring out what she’s upset about and toresolving it. Here’s a little exercise. This is a man who always returns backto two pet peeves of his: I hate my mother, and I hate the synagogue. Canyou figure out the pattern? A good mother envelops you with love, a goodsynagogue serves as an embracing warm center. The pattern is pointing usto the next level of dream opening.Drash, the questionWhat is the real question the dream is trying to figure out? This is thehardest level to home into. The dream has a motivating purpose; it is tryingto resolve something. Let’s go back to the man who hates his mother andthe synagogue. While this was not a night dream, it was a repetitive motifhe brought up every time he came to see me. You will come to see that thereis little difference between a person’s repetitive stories and their repetitivedreams. Your friends’ repetitive stories are like bad dreams, and you mustconsider them as such. What was the real question here? What was the manlooking for? Hating his mother suggested that she had rejected him. Heequated the synagogue, where she went regularly, to his mother. In his mindthey were one and the same. He had put them both in the same bag. Thequestion was: Wherecan I find loving support in a trustworthyenvironment? Clarifying the true question of the dream is already pointingus to what I call “responding to the necessity of the dream.”*37Sod, the secret or treasureHere the dream companions pause and wait. If they have opened the dreamappropriately (becoming the secondary dreamers of the dream, they havedescribed what they feel about the dream, and what they feel its truequestion is), the original dreamer will be touched. His/her (the originaldreamer) response signifies whether or not the treasure has been accessed,and the original dreamer feels relieved and enlightened.Remember that you can open your own dreams. After writing yournight dream in your DreamBook, underline the words that indicate thepatterns, and then ask yourself what the real question of your dream is.†38Your dreams are like the daily briefings every president of the UnitedStates begins his day with. The daily briefing, your dream, tells you aboutnational (internal) and international (external) security issues you aredealing with and warns you of impending dangers. If you neglect yourdreams, those security issues could implode (health issues) or explode(difficulties in your daily life and relationships). You will be sentnightmares and other difficult dream messages to get your attention. In thischapter I have described the way to plunge into a dream’s true meanings. Inthe next chapter we will see how we can dialogue with our dreams to beginworking together toward maximum health and harmony. Our dreams areour best advisors. We must learn to engage with them in mutually beneficialcollaboration.D2Tikun and a Ladder to theLightIf one is disturbed by a dream he has seen, let him remedythe dream in the presence of three people.BERAKHOT 55Bo our dreams bob up on the waters of the subconscious just because ofsome random impulse of the subterranean world or some anxiety ofthe moment? Or is there more: a story line, a theme, or even acontinuum appearing over the course of many night dreams? As we hoverover the p’nei tehom of our subconscious, watching our dreams appearing,do we, like God, say “That is good?”1*39 On the sixth day God calls all thatHe created “tov m’od,” very good!2 † 40 Midrash tells us that Adam, God’sultimate creation, contains all His creation, which he mirrors back to God.Adam is pure light and color.3 Subsequently he falls from translucence intoa naked body, and his mirror becomes opaque. We are his descendants.How do we work with our dreams to return to being the pure mirror Godcreated us to be, His dream come to perfection? If there is an unfoldingprocess back toward tov m’od, the very good, our conscious participation indeveloping that purpose is necessary.Our dreams live in a timeless present that dissolves just as suddenly asit is experienced. How can there be a continuum? We might as well speakof squaring a circle. And yet I am suggesting that a dialogue, creatingcontinuum, is possible. All dialogues imply a give and take in time. Candialogue and experience live in the same universe? We can dialogueendlessly about our relationship, but the experience of love is somethingaltogether different. It’s timeless and revelatory, fresh as a gushing fountain.Fitting the dome of the sky on the square walls of the earth has been done incountless basilicas, never perfectly, but the effort has been well worth it. Wefeel grounded while also being uplifted by the soaring cupola above thesquare columns. We talk about our relationships (the square columns), andwe live our relationships (the soaring cupola). Both movements areenriching. Ignoring one side of the equation will result in a drying up ofoptions or feeling.Is there a way to dialogue, to speak across (dia) the barrier? And if thereis, what would we gain by doing so? We can stay on this side of the barrierand “analyze” our dreams. We can peruse dream dictionaries to tell us whatimages mean. This might feel more secure, but it is fruitless: You cannotanalyze experience without bleeding it of meaning. You can’t stay on thisside of the barrier. But then, must you jump across the abyss? How do youdialogue in the land of nonsense and come back making logical sense? Howdo sense and nonsense interact? The answer lies in the interface. The self-conscious speaks in words (the square columns), and the subconsciousspeaks in images (the cupola). It is the mix of these two languages that wemust learn to integrate. The poet is best suited to that task. His words speakimages and experience. Hearing the voice of the poet, revelation comes as itcame to the Hebrews at the foot of Mount Sinai. “And the people saw thevoices.”4 How we will be using words to tap into the subconscious and “seethe voices,” and how those images will, in turn, elicit descriptive words—words that are based in actual inner body experience—will be discussed inchapter 3. Meanwhile, seeing the voices, we can enter into the experienceand interact with the images. We dialogue by responding to the necessityof the images, a work that is called “tikun,” rectification/correction. Theaim, you will remember, is to return to being a true mirror of God.Dialoguing with the dream is a subversive action that has beendisenfranchised time and again. “Here comes the dreamer, come now andlet us kill him,”5 say his older brothers on seeing Joseph, the epitome of thedreamer in the Bible. Many of us, like Joseph’s brothers, have wanted tokill our dreams or ignore their relevance. The brothers shove the dreamerinto a pit, another way of saying that they shove their dreams into oblivion.Joseph is seventeen when he has two seminal dreams:“Listen to this dream I had: we were binding sheaves of grain out inthe field when suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright, while yoursheaves gathered around mine and bowed down to it.”6He had another dream, and told it to his brothers. “Listen,” he said,“I had another dream, and this time the sun and moon and elevenstars were bowing down to me.”7Looking at these two dreams you wouldn’t be wrong in thinking that thedreamer has a bad case of narcissism. Joseph, the Bible tells us, was a vainyoung man. And yet both dreams are speaking about a future that has littleto do with vanity, a future that is already preexistent and embodied in thepresent. “His brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the matter inmind,”8 because his father recognized the perfect symmetry and repetitionof the two dreams, a sign of prophecy.9 Here was his son’s potentialrevealed—for a moment in perfect alignment but not yet earned—ablueprint of Joseph’s soul, portending a possible future, like a seedcontaining its future flowering. We call these “great dreams.” We are allgreat dreams in potential. Sometimes, like Joseph, we are gifted with avision of who our soul knows we are. We will talk more about these typesof dreams in a moment.Since we are God’s dream, we can consider our whole life as one longdream within which we have night dreams. This is the lens we will use toconsider Joseph’s life story: a dream within which night dreams occur andrectification is possible. Or more accurately, a myth. What is the differencebetween dream and myth? “Myths are collective dreams, and are not to betaken as literal. They are metaphors.”10 Joseph’s story is not the story of aboy named Joseph, with all of its particulars; rather, it’s the story of everyboy. Myths and, as we will see further on, fairy tales, are common dreamsshared by humanity through the collective subconscious. Contrary to apersonal night dream, in the myth or fairy tale, all extraneous events havebeen eliminated, every hero or heroine is generic, and the application of thenecessity is part of the storytelling modeling all similar scenarios. Joseph’sname, from the root word YSF, means “the one who adds,” that which isneeded to transform and grow a life. Adding means answering the necessityof the dream. “To use yourself differently is the key to your salvation,”11and myth (or fairy tale) lays out that path, showing you how it’s done. Wewill use Joseph’s myth as an example of DreamOpening.Since we are considering Joseph’s entire life story as his dream, weapply the rules of DreamOpening to the story, and we consider that everypart of the dream is a part of the dreamer. Thus, the jealous brothers areparts of Joseph. The brother parts of himself (jealousy, carelessness, envy,competitiveness, vanity) destroy his great dreams and send him into a pitwhere there is no water and no refreshing hope. “They cast him into a pitswarming with snakes and scorpions, beside which was another unused pit,filled with offal.”12*41 Darkness, aridity, snakes, scorpions, and offal alloffer the sensations of some awful fate. Then he is pulled out of the pit andsold into slavery. In other words, this is a nightmare. You can easilytranspose that myth into the story of the boy next door who falls into a drughabit, becoming enslaved to his addiction. Finally, a better part of himself(in Joseph’s story, this is Potiphar, the man who appoints Joseph overseer ofhis house) pulls out of his addiction to rebuild his life and get his house inorder. Climbing out of the nightmare (the pit), Joseph begins a linearjourney toward embodying the potential that was, for a moment, revealed inhis two night dreams. Simultaneously, he also rises (out of the pit) like goodbread or a “good” dream, in a vertical journey toward freedom. Rememberthat “bread” and “dream” have the same letters, HaLoM and LeHeM.*42The brothers—the parts of Joseph that deny and destroy his “goodness”—tear at his robe of many colors, smear it with the blood of a wild animal (hisemotions), and present it to their father Jacob as proof that his favorite sonis dead. Imagine your dream brothers as your emotions. You are the angry,rebellious, rude, nasty teenager being predictably impossible with yourfather, letting your father know that you are dead to his advice and way oflife. The robe of many colors is the kaleidoscope of your inner seeing. Youwere born with it, and it is every human being’s inheritance. Tearing at therobe is an imaginal way of saying that you are sabotaging your mostprecious tool of transformation: your dreaming.In the story, the work continues sub rosa—the subconscious cannot befully extinguished. Joseph adds to the dream by following where thelanguage of the subconscious takes him, and by responding to its necessity.He becomes the mouthpiece for the dream, a powerful role, as it is said,“The dream follows the mouth.”13 As a dream opener, opening the dreamsof his fellow prisoners, the cupbearer and the baker,14 it is Joseph whoverbalizes the meaning of the dreams. † 43 In so doing, he manifests thedreams’ predicted outcomes: One will live, and one will die.‡44 Curiously, itis the baker who loses his head. Again, the motif of bread! The bread ofdreaming cannot be on the dreamer’s head. Dreams are not mental butexperiential, for “mythic image is the body speaking to itself aboutitself.”§45 The one who lives is the cupbearer who offers the wine ofexperience to the pharaoh.To “interpret” a dream is an enormous responsibility we all undertake,mostly unaware of the power of our interpretations.*46But Joseph is protected, for he is guided by his connection to God. Heasks, “Do not interpretations belong to God?”15 Here is an interpreter whohas learned to listen to God speaking through dreams. In other words, hehas learned to listen to his subconscious. DreamOpening arises from thesecondary dreamer (you are not the original dreamer) dreaming the dream.Pharaoh, learning of his skills,16 releases the dreamer from prison andgives him the power to use his dream skills for the “good.”Pharaoh has two dreams: one of seven years of plenty, one of sevenyears of famine. Joseph acts upon the necessity of the dreams: In the yearsof plenty he stores the grain needed to feed the people during the years offamine. He provides storage against famine. What kind of famine? “Whenall the land of Egypt hungered, the people cried out to Pharaoh for bread.”17Joseph dreams of wheat†47 shafts when he is young and dispenses grain forbread when he is older. Read this as meaning that Joseph gathers dreampower when he is young and dispenses dream meaning when he is older.Are you surprised when the story tells us that a famine in Canaan sendsJoseph’s brothers down to Egypt to look for grain? What the brothers find istheir brother, their lost self, the dreamer, who has the key to the grain ordream storage. The brothers come to get the “bread of dreaming” they hadpreviously lost, by aggressively separating themselves from their source ofmeaning. Reuniting the dispersed parts of themselves cures their famine.The dream story tells us that killing our dreams is not the answer. Allowingthem to rise like good bread fills us with goodness and meaning. It isthrough following dreams and responding to their necessity that Josephgains his power in the land, second only to Pharaoh.Mythical stories, as well as dreams, have a way of leading us to deepertruths. We could also say they are dreams stripped of personal details andadopted into the collective subconscious. Here is another myth that tells uswhy and how the dialogue needs to engage. Perceval, whom we have metbefore,*48 is traveling to see his mother, when he encounters the dyingFisher King and is invited to a meal at his manor. Beautiful youths andmaidens carry strange objects through the dining hall. A young man holds ableeding lance, a fair maiden carries an elaborately decorated cup. Percevallooks and wonders, but having been warned not to question his elders, hedoesn’t inquire. Upon leaving the manor, he learns that his mother has died.Later at Camelot, a loathly woman confronts him. She chides him for notasking the questions: Whom does the grail serve? And why the bloodylance? For, she says, those questions would have healed the dying king.Whenever you listen to a story, be it your friend’s story, a night dream, amyth, or a fairy tale, think of it as a dream that requires you to open it. Thatis its first necessity. All stories are dreams coming from the flow of yourimagination, including those you tell yourself and those your friends tellyou. Opening them as dreams will reveal their secrets. In the story line, theFisher King is wounded, and only the question can heal him. We havealready talked about fishing, throwing the line into the ocean of thesubconscious to find the hidden treasure, Sod. We have spoken of asking aquestion of the subconscious and receiving a dream in response. Here thequestioner must go further. Having received the dream, he must dialoguewith the dream itself. This, says the old woman, is what will heal you. Todo this, again, think of every part of the dream as an aspect of the dreamer.The dreamer Perceval, the wounded Fisher King, the bleeding lance, thegrail, and the mother, all are parts of the dreamer, since the dreamer’ssubconscious creates the dream. Mythical stories, night dreams, and visionscome from what our bodies tell us they are experiencing. “The humanimagination is grounded in the energies of the body.”18 Listening to them,we are the secondary dreamers of this story. We become every part of thestory. We know the Fisher King of our subconscious is wounded: Our intentto fish into the subconscious is compromised. At the end of the story, themother—our mare, our ocean, our subconscious waters—who usuallynourishes and sustains us, has died. The story is telling us that the dreamerhas lost contact with his subconscious, his source of truth. He is at adangerous crossroads, and our conscious mind must do something about itbefore it is too late.The bleeding lance is showing us that someone has been hurt.The grail is a vessel meant to contain, but to what purpose is stillunknown.As listeners of the story, are you not eager to find out? A child—Perceval is described as a simpleton, a good child—will ask the simplequestions:Whose blood is on the lance?What is in the cup?These simple questions are the necessity of the dream. The dream is askingus to pursue the unfinished business of the dream. When you wake up, youneed to return into the dream and respond to the necessity the dreampresents to you. After all, the dream is a part of you. Why would youdistance yourself from what it’s trying to tell you? Because it speaks inimages doesn’t make it less worthy of your attention.Exercise 5The Drop of BloodClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.With your index finger, pick up a drop of the blood from thelance. Lift it to the light of the sun.Breathe out. What images arise out of this place ofwounding? See the images. How old are you in thosememories? Who is there with you? What is happening?Breathe out. Accept the images. Ask the sun to clear theimages by flooding them with warm golden light.Breathe out. Put the drop of golden light on your tongueand swallow it, asking it to reintegrate its perfect role in thehealthy functioning of your body.Breathe out. Open your eyes.The subconscious will show you when the drop of blood is integrated intoyour DreamField. Answering the necessity of the dream, you have healedthat wounded part of yourself.And the grail?Exercise 6The GrailClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.You are in the manor of the Fisher King. A beautiful youngwoman shows you an ornamented cup she’s holding.Approach her and look in the cup. What do you see?Breathe out. If you don’t like what you see, respond to thenecessity of the images until the subconscious shows youimages that feel good to you.Breathe out. Open your eyes.The key to dealing with the subconscious is always to respond to itsimages, but never to force them.I see a snake coming out of the grail cup.What color is it? Green.What kind of green? Dark green.Do you like the color? No.Ask the snake why it is here. The snake hisses.Ask the snake what it is angry about. It shows me notstanding up to my boss, and not standing up to my fatherwhen I was a kid.Ask the snake how you can learn to do that. It opens itsmouth and shows me a radiant sun in its mouth. It blows thesun into my solar plexus. The solar plexus expands, and I feelvery strong.Look at the cup now. What is in the cup? A bright sun.Breathe out. Open your eyes.For each of you, looking into the grail will reveal something differentand unique. The great wonder of the subconscious is that it speaks to you,in images, about the mystery of your soul. Remember to always respectyour subconscious and let it reveal its images to you. By responding in thesame language—images—and watching your subconscious unfold like aluminous flower, you will be filled with wonder and a sense of growingmeaning.When I was in Japan, I was introduced to Mr. Obata, the head of amartial arts lineage called Ying Yang. Mr. Obata teaches dreaming to hisdisciples as part of his strengthening process. Our work had much incommon. I also teach dreaming techniques to strengthen my students. Forinstance, a strong solar plexus will protect and arm a student with thestrength of will and magnetism they need to face the world. Mr. Obataexplained to me that in his tradition, if you have a bad dream, you come tosee the master. The master buys your bad dream and sells you one of hisgood dreams. He told me with pride that he is the undisputed expert atbuying and selling dreams in Japan. A stock exchange for dreams?Presumably the master is able to transform the bad dream into a gooddream, just as King David did, who dreamed the nightmares of his peopleevery night. In Jewish tradition hatavat halom, amelioration of the dream, isstill a common practice. If you have had a bad dream you must ask threefriends to declare to you: “You have seen a good dream; it is good and mayit become good and may the Merciful One transform it to the good.”In my ancient Kabbalistic lineage we answer the necessity of the dreamevery morning after writing the dream down. To fail to do so would bedetrimental to your well-being. How do you recognize the necessity?Exactly as you would recognize the necessity in everyday life: If the door isopen, go through. If it is closed, ask yourself if you want to open it. If thetable is dirty, wash it. If there is a mirror, go look in the mirror. If there is aknot, untie it. If you see a closed book, read its title and open it. If yourmale and female aspects are fighting, find what needs to be removed oradded to bring peace between these aspects. You will find more examples ofnecessity and repair when we deal with repetitive dreams. A dream is notfixed; it is engaged in a dialogue with you: It asks you to pursue themovement toward the good it points you toward. Imagine opening up acomputer program, finding a virus, and doing nothing to correct it. It can’tcorrect itself without your input, nor can the dream. Night after night it willrepeatedly offer you the same images until you clear the virus. Not alldreams appear bad, but many are asking us to ameliorate them. Again, youdo not arbitrarily change the dream to good. You read the images, followwhere they lead you, and respond. You dialogue in images with the dreamuntil the subconscious comes up with its own solution. This is an organicmovement, intrinsic to the dreamer’s own truth, and far more powerful.Your dreams, like your immune system, which they reflect, always strivefor greater balance, greater goodness, and greater consciousness expansion.Knowing how to respond to the necessity of your dream images gives youtools you can use on your own. You will also find that responding to thenecessity of your dreams teaches you to do the same in your waking life.You learn to not waste time, and to respond immediately, or as soon aspossible. Seeing your own powerful transformations take shape in yourmind’s eye will give you the hope and the power to continue climbing theladder of dreams.From the darkness of the pit to the light of supreme power, Josephnavigated a ladder of growth using his understanding of and amelioration ofdreams. His father Jacob had forged the way. He too was a dreamer. A manon the run, Jacob lay down to sleep in the desert and dreamed a seminaldream. This dream models the ultimate goal of dreaming. Jacob sees avertical path, a ladder ascending from Earth to heaven. At the summit of theladder is God, the transcendent, the ultimate One. Angelic messages, dreamforms, flow up from Jacob to God and from God down to Jacob, telling usthat dreams are arrows of intent, a means of reaching the divine, and waysthe divine has of speaking to us. The subconscious veils of Jacob’s soulhave parted, and Jacob’s soul mirrors God. For a moment, “what is below islike to what is above.”19 God blesses Jacob and all dreamers who dare todraw apart the veils of the subconscious: “You will spread out to the westand to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on Earth will beblessed through you and your offspring. I am with you and will watch overyou wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land.”20The five levels of the soul ascend from the dense physical body to thesubtle ethereal form. These are nefesh, the body and awareness of thephysical sensations; ruah,*49 the spirit and emotions; neshamah,†50 the souland intellectual understanding; hayah, the nullification of the ego andmerging with the divine; and yehidah, the God consciousness of the firsthuman, Adam haRishon.‡51Think of the levels like layers of clothing as a metaphor for layers ofconsciousness. As you drop your clothes one by one, you come closertonakedness, the truth, reflecting the divine form. We will see that the fiverungs of the ladder of dreams mirror the five levels of the soul. The work ofdreaming that we will set forth allows you to reach closer to Godconsciousness.The First Level: Nefesh DreamsThe NightmareThe robe of many colors, as we have said, is the kaleidoscope of your innerseeing. You were born with it, and it is your inheritance. Its colors are thosethat light up your inner world when you look in. Going up the ladder ofdreams is about restoring those colors to your inner life. If you have lostsomeone you love, or have known trauma, you will have experienced howcolor seeps out of your life, and the world turns gray. Mourners used to puton sackcloth and cover their heads with ashes. When we do not follow theinner dictates of our superconscious—which is our soul—our inner worldturns dull and our dreams darken. We are looking at the garbage on thesurface of the ocean that obscures the radiant colors of the superconscious.In the case of the nightmare, the colors most often seen are black, red, orfluorescent, like acid green.Remember that you are dealing with the inner world, where linearitydoesn’t exist. One night you may have a nightmare, the next you may havea dream in clear colors. Colors tell you where you are in the presentmoment on the ladder. Don’t be disappointed. Joseph had two great dreams,and then he fell into a pit (nightmare). Coming out of it, he was a slave(slave to his baser instincts) and was tempted by a woman.21*52 In thesubsequent turmoil, he lost his bright dreams again: He was put into prison(another pit). You will all go back and forth on the ladder until somethingconsolidates and you “cleave” to the light. The Kabbalists call this dveikut.Joseph achieved dveikut when he forgave his brothers and gathered them allinto his arms. We will talk more about dveikut subsequently. The aim of thedreamer, Maimonides tells us, is to become like a constellation or a star inthe sky. As you have guessed, the top of the ladder is pure light. For amoment, as pure light, you are the mirror image of God.The Talmud tells us that nightmares are our best dreams. They wake usup, shake us up, and remind us to pay attention. King David had nightmaresevery night so that he could clear his people’s inner garbage. Like KingDavid, you too must respond to the necessity of your nightmare if you wantto ascend the ladder.Exercise 7Protection in a NightmareClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Look up into the blue sky. See where the sun is. Catch aray of light, and wrap yourself in a cocoon of light. If needed,fashion weapons of light, such as a shield and sword.(If it is nighttime in your dream, look up into the night skyand catch the light from the Milky Way.)Breathe out. When you are protected, address thenecessity of the dream.Breathe out. Open your eyes.But what if you were to wake up from a nightmare and say, “It was onlya dream!” as so many others have? Having dismissed your dream, you mayfind that your dream life becomes less vivid, or your dreams fade away.Repetitive DreamsAs if tired of trying to shake you awake, your dreams will becomerepetitive. Like a broken record, they spew up the same message adnauseam. Here are some examples of repetitive dreams:I’m going to miss my train; I have to take an exam but haven’tprepared; I’ve lost my wallet; my teeth are falling out; I can’tfind my house and search endlessly for other houses, none ofwhich suit me; the toilets are clogged; I’m falling with no endin sight; I’ve lost my pants and am walking around naked.Need I continue? We have all been plagued with repetitive dreams. Whatour repetitive dreams tell us is that a big clump of refuse is obscuring ourinner lens. Being stuck makes us anxious, and most repetitive dreams areanxious dreams. But there is hope, as the labors of Herakles (Hercules inLatin) show us. Some of his labors, such as cleaning out the Augean stables(clogged toilets), and getting rid of the Stymphalian birds*53 (monkeymind) are reminiscent of repetitive dreams.Exercise 8Responding to the Necessity of RepetitiveDreamsResponding to the necessity of clogged toilets, flush them andclean them. For fallen teeth, plant them back in your gum, justas the dentist would do in real life. If you are late for a train,turn back the clock and see that you have all the time in theworld.By responding to the necessity of your repetitive dream, you clear it out,and it won’t reappear. By the end of his labors, when Herakles hasconquered each of his tasks, he becomes a star in the sky. Dveikut happensfor him too. He cleaves to the light.Repetitive dreams have mixed and muddied colors. Khaki, mustardyellow, or purple-tinged gray are common colors for these dreams.Busy DreamsPaying no attention to your nightlife, or simply being too busy with youreveryday reality to sink into deep sleep, brings on busy dreams. Busydreams are shallow dreams. Your dreams flounder around, looking formeaning. “Too many dreams and nonsense.”22 They may resemble closelyyour everyday busyness: running around, endlessly shopping, endlesslytraveling, endlessly turning around in the same space, endlessly scrolling onyour phone.Colors of busy dreams are mostly gray, dull, or mixed.This is what you do with busy dreams.Exercise 9Clearing Busy DreamsClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine that you are seeing your busy dream on a screen.With your left hand, sweep the images of the dream out of thescreen to the left.Breathe out. Breathe in the blue light from the sky throughyour nostrils into your mouth, filling your mouth with blue light.Blow the blue light on the screen, seeing the screenbecoming blue and clear as a bright blue sky.Breathe out.Now watch your breathing, allowing your breath to find itsown rhythm; knowing that when your breath finds its rhythm,what is out of place tends to return to be in place.Breathe out. Bring your consciousness down into yourchest. Watch your breathing, allowing your breath to find itsown rhythm; knowing that when your breath finds its ownrhythm, what is out of place tends to return to be in place.Breathe out. Bring your consciousness all the way downinto your abdomen. Watch your breathing, allowing yourbreath to find its own rhythm; knowing that when your breathfinds its own rhythm what is out of order tends to return to bein order.Breathe out. Let your consciousness flood your wholebody, reaching the tips of your toes, your fingers, your hair,the edges of your skin and beyond. Open your eyes.Nightmares, repetitive dreams, busy dreams are the first rung of theladder. As we have said, their level of soul is nefesh, the animal soul level.We all have them, so don’t feel bad. Remember that, like Herakles, youmust tackle the task at hand and respond to its necessity today. If you do,you will find yourself much more often dreaming higher up on the ladder ofdreams.The Second Level: Ruah DreamsThe Clear DreamThe second rung up the ladder is the clear dream. We could also call it aclearing dream, because it shows you a way through the garbage of thesubconscious. Your clear dream is asking you to perfect its work. It doesn’tcompletely show you how to do this, but it indicates the way. It correspondsto the soul level ruah,* the breath. It is active. Your breath and youremotions are intimately linked. Your emotions change your breathingrhythm. You must make an effort, interact with the dream, and follow wherethe images lead you! If there is a closed door, open it, go through, see whatis beyond. If there is a broken bridge, repair it and cross over. Alwaysrespond to the necessity. By doing so, your emotions will calm down. Theclear dream is your friendly dream.It isn’t frightening or boring. Most ofour dreams are clear dreams.The colors of the clear dream are the colors of our everyday life, clear,pastel, and natural.The Third Level: Neshamah DreamsThe Great DreamNow comes the third rung: the great dream. The soul level is neshamah.From here on you won’t need to respond to a necessity as there will benone. It’s as though the waters parted, and you can clearly see yoursuperconscious. For a moment, having attained perfect alignment, you getto glimpse your true potential, as we saw happening in Joseph’s dreams.The great dream shows you your neshamah, your soul, in all its intense andvivid colors. You never forget a great dream. Its impression is indeliblyimprinted on your memory.The colors of the great dream are vivid blues, deep emeralds, pure fireengine reds, and bright yellows. The purity of the colors and their intensityare striking.The Fourth Level: HayahOn the fourth rung your dream floods you with white light. This is hayah.Every image, if images are there, will be intensely white. You are returningto be like Adam before the expulsion from Eden.The Fifth Level: YehidahThere is a fifth level. Can you imagine it? It is called yehidah, union withoneness. For a moment you are the pure mirror reflecting God.Dveikut is when, having done your clearing work, you finally cleave tothe higher rungs of the ladder. Your dreams become pure light every night.When our imaginative faculty reaches a state of ultimate perfection, allimages disappear. While we cannot will ourselves up the ladder, we nowhave tools to dialogue toward a greater good in ourselves. Respecting ourdreams by:writing them down every morningopening the dreamsresponding to their necessityengages the dialogue. Soon you will see a continuum appearing. If yourclump of garbage relates to your father, night after night, the dreams willtackle that problem until the garbage is cleared, and you are free of it. If youare in a dream group, you will soon experience how one dreamer tackling afather problem triggers other dreamers to tackle their own father issues. Afascinating dance engages all participants until the father issue has clearedfor all dreamers in the group.Bringing dreams or images up from the subconscious is useless unless eachtime we respond to the necessity of our images. The work of tikun (TKN:fix), rectification/correction, is the work of the tailor who fixes andassembles many pieces to create a perfect garment. Like Joseph, we havelost or damaged our inner garment, our robe of many colors. We have seenthat we can correct it by adding in new pieces, and new colors. We canclimb the ladder the slow way, through our night dreams, repairing ourgarment until our robe of multicolored light is restored to us. “In Kabbalah .. . we are taught that the consummately rectified “power of imagination”borders on the powers of prophecy.”23 But is there a faster way to engage inthe work?This next chapter will address just this question head on. Can we,instead of relying only on our night dreams, tap into our subconscious atwill, during our secular time, and accelerate the work of tikun?C3Incubation and SaphireImageryEither let me see it in a dream, or let it be discovered bydivination, or let a “ divinely inspired priest/priestessdeclare it, or let them all find out by incubation whatever Idemand of them.”SECOND PLAGUE PRAYER OF MURSILI IIan we become even more proactive in bringing up images from oursubconscious? Can we, instead of relying only on our night dreams,tap into our subconscious at will, in our day-to-day activities, toaccelerate the work of correction? If Joseph’s life story is a dream, so too isour life story. Can we look at it as a dream, and deal with it accordingly,using tikun as a means of transformation and amelioration?Like Joseph, the great dreamer of the Bible, we have a robe of manycolors. Our robe of many colors is our dreaming. We dream all the time.That kaleidoscope of colors, shapes, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures weexperience as we navigate the world is what feeds our ancient brain, ourstorehouse of experiences. Our storehouse is constantly replenished day andnight and built up by our ongoing experiences. From the moment we areconceived until the moment of our death, we are accumulating experiences.Our brain doesn’t wait for nightfall to begin absorbing through all oursenses what we call image—the 3D language of all our senses working insynergy. Images are always available to us if we know how to tap into oursubconscious.What we know about images is that our experiences are nestled, likeRussian dolls, into form within form. This in-form-ation isn’t available forviewing until you induce it into motion. The double process of storage andinduction is what I call dreaming. Your night dreams and daytime visionsare the result of these two activities. The first activity—storage—happenssubconsciously, without your active participation. The second—induction—requires a stirring of the subconscious soup. An unexpected jolt or shockmay set off a dream or daytime vision. Or you may consciously induce ajolt to provoke a dream or vision. Induction is what we are going to beexploring in this chapter. There are two types of induction: the nightinduction that is called incubation, and the daytime induction that is specificto Saphire, the ancient Kabbalistic lineage I belong to.*54Incubation can be seen as “any act of intentional sleeping to producedreams” or simply as a phase of creativity. Let us first look at the narrowerdefinition of incubation, as it was practiced in classical Greece, and lateracross the ancient Mediterranean world. Most of the examples of dreamincubation that have come down to us are pleas for healing. Asclepius, sonof Apollo, was the god of healing. His temples, called Asclepions, werededicated to the practice of healing through dream therapy. The mostfamous Asclepion in classical Greece was Epidaurus, but there were manyothers scattered around the peninsula. Since we do not have dream templesanymore, we will try to understand the steps used in the ancient world forincubation, to learn from them the best way to incubate our own dreams.Pilgrimage to a temple required time, effort, and money. People came fromall over the peninsula, often on foot, and the travels were long and arduous.At the temple, pilgrims were first required to go through an intensepurification process called katharsis. On the physical level, this meantundergoing ritual baths and purges for three days, while eating a clean diet.If the complaint was of the mind, purging of the emotions was done throughsome form of art therapy. The second phase consisted of making an offeringof an animal sacrifice. This was often the hardest part, since manysupplicants lacked the funds for an animal sacrifice and were thereforeprecluded from the ritual. The third phase was the actual incubationprocess. The patient was brought into the temple to sleep, in the hope thatproximity to the divinity would induce a divine visitation. The god often didappear in the supplicant’s dream, or in a half-conscious vision, with adviceand directions for healing. If the god did not appear in the dream but thesupplicant had a dream, the dream was interpreted by the priest, and used todetermine an appropriate treatment. A modernday example of a priest-interpreter of dreams is Edgar Cayce, with the difference being that he didthe dreaming for his patients, using dream incubation to read his patients’bodies, and then suggested a remedy.Adapting the oneiromancy practices of the ancient Greeks to a moderncontext requires some thought. The pilgrimage, the sacrifice, the sleeping ina sacred place, are all steps that must be modified in a modern context.What do pilgrimage and sacrifice imply? A burning desire—a willingnessto “sacrifice” your all—to get an answer. What do you want to knowsourgently today that you are willing to dedicate all your time, energy, andresources to it? While most examples we have from the ancient world wererequests for healing dreams, your questions can be more far reaching.Remember that a question implies a need for clarification, transformation,and new configurations. All sincere questions are valid here, and thepilgrimage can be within. A pilgrimage always suggests a direction: I’mgoing to Epidaurus, or I’m going to my dreamtime. Honing your question toa fine point is similar to choosing to set forth toward Epidaurus, albeit notas physically taxing. To make this inner pilgrimage successful, a fiercedetermination and focus are required. Your question must be simple,reduced to its barest elements. Your dreaming should be able to answer yourquestion via a simple yes or no. Here is an exercise to help you whittledown your question.Exercise 10The Question BannerClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Gather all the different strands of your question into yourhands, and roll the strands up into a ball. See the color of theball.Breathe out. Throw the ball into the sky. Watch itdisappearing into the blue sky.Breathe out. On its return, see the ball unfurling like abanner over your head. What color is the banner? Whatimage or words appear on the banner?Breathe out. Open your eyes.If the question does not call for yes or no, try asking for a dream to narrowdown the issues for you. You could use this formula: What is the advice ofmy dreaming on the true question concerning my issue? Your question isthe arrow that stirs the subconscious soup and jolts it to respond.Exercise 11The Flying ArrowClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine that you are in front of a round mirror. Take up acolored crayon and write on the mirror, “Show me my truequestion.”Breathe out. See the letters becoming a flying arrowshooting straight into your dream world.Breathe out. Ask to remember your dream as you wakeup.Breathe out. Open your eyes.Once you have your true question, what will your sacrifice be? Youmust offer the “beast” of your own time and attentiveness to the process.Your Asclepion may be your very own bedchamber, but it will be yourfierce desire to stimulate a dream that will transform it into a sacred space.Exercise 12Asking a Question of Your DreamLie in your bed, on your back, with your limbs uncrossed, andyour eyes closed. Breathe out slowly three times, seeing thenumbers from three to one.Breathe out on zero, open your mouth, and blow the zeroout, seeing it become a circle of light in front of you.Breathe out. See your question appear in the circle of light.Breathe out. See the light flooding the question until all theletters have turned to light.Breathe out. Breathe in the light to illuminate and orientyour dreamtime tonight.Breathe out. Don’t open your eyes; just let yourself sinkinto a deep but intentional sleep.Will your dreamtime answer your urgent supplication? Don’t take myword for it. Why should you? You don’t have the example of countlesspilgrims who came before you, vouching for the process, who experienceda divinely inspired dream and returned cured. Many of you may not ascribeto God or even to the belief that there is something divine/creative withinyou that knows. You will have to suspend your critical mind and give it atry. My best advice to you is to be adventurous: Dare to spend the timeexploring the possibility that there is a mystery within you (call it life) thatcan guide you to your answer. If you are rewarded with an answer, won’t ithave been worth your time? Confirming to yourself your dreaming mind’sability to deliver truthful answers grows your trust. The more you seek yourown inner counsel, the more actively it will seek you out. If your nightdream answers your urgent question, you can take a red pen and mark thebox labeled “verification” in your DreamBook.Taking seriously your desire to remember your dreams is of course, anecessary first step in the incubation process. Have your DreamBook open,write down tonight’s date, and have a pen ready for your use. Onawakening, write everything that you’ve seen. Don’t omit any details. Doesyour dream give you a clear answer? If not, return to chapter 1 and usePRDS, the four levels, to open your dream. If you still don’t get an answer,then maybe your question wasn’t properly honed. If you are seriouslydetermined, go back to whittling down your question and try again.Incubation in its larger sense is a phase of creativity that involves lettingideas sit and churn in the subconscious until some novel configurationemerges. You can envision your inner space as a pouch into which you dropyour question. How are you going to signal to your subconscious that youdesire an answer if your question isn’t one of the urgent ones we’ve justdiscussed? Here is an example of how it works: I need to give a speech insix weeks, but I have no idea what I’ll be talking about. I drop the question“What should I talk about?” into the pouch, or if you prefer, into the back ofmy mind (I always see it as the back of my neck), and create the urgency bygiving the subconscious a date. For example: I need an answer in threeweeks or on March 15. Does it work? As you probably know, thesubconscious lives in timelessness. Past, present, and future are all jumbledup. Why would the subconscious answer you in three weeks, or even morespecifically, on March 15? Where is the interface between subconscioustimelessness and linear consciousness?The subconscious acts like the programming in your computer. Unlessyou consciously or accidentally open a specific program, the program willforever remain hidden. Your conscious mind or a jolt must initiate themovement. Your subconscious cannot show itself unless stirred to do so byanxiety (the induction behind many dreams) or asked to do so by anurgently felt question. If the question is not urgent today but may be in threeweeks, timing will act as the induction. Timing is the key to the meetinghere: If I want to meet my friend tomorrow, I must ask, where and when?Space and time are the two essential coordinates of meeting. Withoutdefining space and time, the meeting won’t happen. It is the same with theconscious and the subconscious. The space, we know, is the inner spacealready spoken of. Now we must establish the timing.Exercise 13Timing Your AnswerClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine that you have a question you need answered inthree weeks’ time. Imagine writing your question on a piece ofpaper and folding the paper three times into a triangularshape.Breathe out. Write on it the date at which you need yourquestion answered. Drop it into your dreaming pouch.Breathe out. Deliberately forget your question, letting itsink out of sight into your dreaming pouch. Program yourselfto continue forgetting it for the three coming weeks.Breathe out. Ask to be informed of the answer in threeweeks’ time.Breathe out. Open your eyes.You cannot know for sure that this will work unless you take the risk oftrusting your dreaming. The answer can come in many different ways, sokeep your eyes and ears open. You may have a night dream or walk into abookstore and a book calls out to you. When you pick it up, it is the answerto your question. Or someone says something that triggers your creativeinsight, or you see a sign on a billboard, and suddenly, eureka! The answeris clear and unequivocal. We call this phenomenon synchronicity.Creativity and truth are linked in the subconscious. The sign of creativity isa knowing, a certainty that this is right! This is the truth! The artist simplyknows he’s using the right color. Thephysicist knows this is the rightdirection to explore. The dreamer sees and does not question what she sees.The experience is often called intuition. Intuition acts as a powerfulrevelation, opening up a whole new set of experiences. I am often asked:How do we know this is not fantasy? How do we know we are not beingfooled to believe what we want to believe? Fantasy is not revelation; itdoesn’t deal with truth. Fantasy is a distorted use of the imagination by yourleft brain to serve a foregone conclusion. The desire to be a superman, asuperhero, with big muscles and the ability to knock down any obstacle inthe way; or a downtrodden woman who is finally recognized for her innercharms by a rich man who carries her away on a white horse. Am I mixingmetaphors? You know it’s a fantasy, because the story gets more and moreexaggerated, like the latest Hollywood blockbusters. Fantasy exhausts,whereas revelation brings renewal, freshness, and joy. Revelation is alwaysunexpected. How to trigger it consciously is our issue.The sign of a creative mind is the leap, the ability to find unexpectedlinks between apparently disparate elements. “There is nothing new underthe sun,”1 says Solomon, the wisest of men. But we can play with all theforms we do have. There is an inexhaustible cornucopia of possible newconfigurations. We often hear that many people can reason, but few arecreative. Is that true? Creativity can be activated. The ability to know is agift all men and women have been endowed with but most adults have lost.As children we all have it—we play, we invent, full of joy andvivaciousness—until we are reined in by linear thinking. Now, as adults,how can we recover our lost joy? How do we open the floodgates ofcreativity? “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, butimagination,” says Einstein, and he should know. He saw himself riding abeam of light when he was a child. His insight was the impetus that led tothe theory of relativity.Like Einstein, we do not have to go to sleep to access our creativesubconscious. Many people have had sudden flashes of insight, but whatbrought them on? Is there another way to incubate, one that doesn’t requirefalling asleep? Can we ignite the flash of insight at will, and instantly? Weknow that honing our question will stir the subconscious to answer us indreams or even during the daytime if we apply some pressure, such astiming. What other, more immediate pressure can we apply?We have seen that many shamanic traditions and mythic stories speakabout “the crossing.” You cross every night when you fall asleep. Butunless you’ve done the work of staying lucid while dreaming, a work we’lladdress, you fall asleep and lose consciousness. Can you come close to thecrossing and not lose consciousness? Gaston Bachelard, a twentiethcenturyFrench philosopher called this half-state—not quite awake, not quite asleep—rêverie. We could call it daydreaming. Rêverie or daydreaming is notfantasy. Unlike fantasy, rêverie has no preconceived goal, except that ofletting go of one’s critical thinking. Suppose that you are a poet and arestuck on a line of your poem: Decide to take a nap with the intent ofcatching the hypnagogic images and words that arise from the chaos ofdreaming. Make sure not to fall asleep, but to stay half lucid on the borderbetween sleep and nonsleep. Many creators have used this technique totrigger their creative inspiration. They write their poems, start their novels,find mathematical answers and responses to burning questions, all at thevery edge of sleep and wakefulness. Or they take a wandering walk innature, eyes un-focused, body relaxed. Rêverie will arise spontaneouslyand, like the night dream, will answer your question, whether it is inchoateor formulated. Make sure you have a notebook at hand. Like Einsteinwhose daydreaming jump-started his creative journey, do not dismiss yourrêverie, and let it guide you to new adventures. You have already taken thefirst step toward rêverie in performing the exercises in this book bycounting 3-2-1 backward.Exercise 14The Dream CatcherLie down with a pen and notebook nearby. Close your eyes.Watch your breathing, allowing your breath to find its ownrhythm. Relax every part of your body, as you do at nightwhen falling asleep.Let yourself sink into half sleep, but with the intention ofstaying just at the horizon between consciousness anddream. Hold the intention that when the first images arise, youwill wake up and remember them.Immediately write down in your notebook what you sawand heard.Then breathe out, and let yourself sink into sleep againwith the same intent: You will awake as soon as the firstimages arise.Once again, immediately write in your notebook everythingyou saw and heard.Then, if you need more “information” from your dreamingcreative pool, start all over again.Rêverie is a very powerful tool that will take you on unanticipatedjourneys into the subconscious. Always make sure you don’t drift off intofantasy. Fantasy has a masturbatory quality to it and doesn’t refresh you.Rêverie does; it gives you a jolt or surprise.Imagine Abraham’s surprise when he hears a voice he recognizes as hisGod’s voice saying terrible things to him: “Please take your son, your onlyone, whom you love—Isaac—and get yourself to the land of Moriah; bringhim up there as an offering.”2 Is it possible that the dream voice can ordersuch evil? A story in which a divine voice orders the killing of one’s ownson can only provoke horror and repulsion. Yet Abraham answers: Hineni, Iam here, I trust the inner calling, I will go. Mount Moriah is three daysaway, a pilgrimage to the Holy of Holies, the sacred space where the futuretemple of Solomon will one day be built. As Abraham tells the two youngmen who had accompanied him and Isaac: “Stay here by yourselves withthe donkey, while I and the lad will go yonder (ad ko).”*55 The donkey iscalled hamor, from the root word homer, meaning clay or matter. Stay herewith the clay or matter, in the literal world, while we go ad ko, beyond, tothat unknown that is hidden from our daily reality. To go beyond, one mustdie to all forms of literal understanding, to linear ties and rationality. Onemust drop all claims, expectations, and hopes of ever truly understandingthe truth of the subconscious ocean that is the core of our being.Abraham lifts his knife to kill the creative form he put such intent intobringing to life, his beloved son Isaac. Abraham makes his sacrifice in thename of the creative God: Something must die for something new toemerge.To give you a more concrete example, it is as if, having written mybook, I erased it because I can sense that a new configuration, a differentway of writing is calling me.Exercise 15HaShem YirehClose your eyes. Breathe out three times, counting from threeto one, seeing the numbers. See the one tall, clear, andbright.Imagine that you are Isaac, tied to the logs of the sacrificialfire. You realize that you are the sacrifice. What are youfeeling?Breathe out. Go beyond, ad ko, to the other world, andlearn what you need to learn.Breathe out. Return, bringing with you the insight you weregiven.Breathe out. Open your eyes, seeing your insight withopen eyes.Isaac wasn’t killed. An angel stopped Abraham’s arm, and a ram wassubstituted for Isaac. Isaac was sent by his father, figuratively speaking, tothe school for prophets and dreamers, the Academy of Shem and Ever,3which, we are told, is “in the world to come”4 or, for our purposes, in theworld ad ko. Then—and here we must marvel—Abraham calls the siteHaShem Yireh, the Lord is seen! You too, in the exercise, have hopefullyseen a new configuration. This is what we call revelation: a new creation.What do we learn from this controversial story? To get to the beyond, wemust die to homer (matter), the rational literal world. How do weaccomplish that? By a shock, such as isStaircase (to lower high bloodpressure)Exercise 128. Star HorseExercise 129. The Green LeafExercise 130. The Lavender FieldExercise 131. The Body ReconfiguresExercise 132. Closing the Solar PlexusExercise 133. Making TeaExercise 134. The Column of LightExercise 135. The Sacrificial RamExercise 136. Walking Away from DramaExercise 137. Exchanging Parts with the Guardian AngelExercise 138. Reversing Phantom Limb PainExercise 139. Poisoned ArrowExercise 140. TransformationsExercise 141. Drinking at the Source (Formal)Exercise 142. Travels on a White CloudExercise 143. Two HandsExercise 144. The Train RideExercise 145. The Music of the DeepPART IIIRaising the Leviathan14 The Heart-Centered WayExercise 146. The QuestExercise 147. Closed and Open CirculationsExercise 148. Why EmotionsExercise 149. In AngerExercise 150. Pain, a Holy SparkExercise 151. Your Worst NightmareExercise 152. In Honor of TagoreExercise 153. Taming the BeastExercise 154. A Broken Heart15 Prayer and the LeviathanExercise 155. The Garden of EdenExercise 156. The Empty BowlExercise 157. DedicationExercise 158. SurrenderExercise 159. Prayer of IntercessionExercise 160. OnenessIPrefaceWithout leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose theexcitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form ofplanning.GLORIA STEINEMhave always been fascinated by the subconscious. At first I didn’t knowwhat the word meant—but I knew I was more interested in followingwhat my imaginary friends were doing than what was happening aroundthe dinner table. In fact, I saw no difference between the angels and fairiesthat populated my world and my little friends I played with in Hyde Park. Itwas my mother who persistently reminded me to pay attention to the realworld and not to dream my life away.I developed many strategies to remain aware of what was happeningaround me, so I was able to accomplish the many tasks that were requiredof me at home and at school. But at the same time, I couldn’t ignore thegoings-on in my other world. It took me years to understand that mostpeople simply lived in the real world and paid scant attention to the otherworld. To me, this was a terrible loss. The flow of my imagination wasvaried and quick, and endlessly entertaining. It also educated me. A largedry leaf could be restored to the soft green of early spring, the leaf stillattached to its branch, and the branch to a centuries-old tree whose wisdomI could hear booming in my inner ear. Colors glistened, and voices sang.Souls required me to accompany them to their heavenly rest. And homelessladies (there was one who lived in a vacant lot opposite our house, and Iwaved to her every evening) needed a cocooning of light to stay warm atnight. I lived a life of richness and beauty I couldn’t get enough of. Idevoured fairy tales and mythological stories. Voices spoke words in myears that I generously transmitted to my playmates. This led to my beingaccused of lying and then punished. I soon learned not to communicatewhat I heard and saw. I became secretive and mute about my inner world,but its lure was too powerful.When it came time to go to college, I opted out of practical solutions(my mother urged me to go to l’École Polytechnique, a prestigiousengineering school, where I would meet lots of nice boys) and went tostudy art history at the Sorbonne in Paris. There I revived, somewhat. Thecolors on the canvases ignited colors within me, and soon my imaginationwas running wild. I wanted to study how images change people, but mythesis professor explained to me that I was there to become a scholar. As heput it, there were two types of people, those who live and those who watchother people live. Art historians watch other people live. I stood up and toldhim I was one of those who lived. I walked out on a career that seemed atthe time the only way forward for me if I was to navigate the real world.After floundering for a while in jobs that didn’t suit me, I decided toapply to American universities. I did well and got a full scholarship toHarvard, but in 1971 I gave it up to follow my inner voice. The voice said:Go to the Middle East. I did. I went all over the Middle East. I wasintending to go to Harvard to study the use of imagery in the politicaldialogue of Arab-speaking countries, so the voice made sense. But then thevoice began making no sense: Go to Israel, it said. I had never beenattracted to Israel or to the Jewish people. In fact, I knew next to nothingabout them. My mother was anti-Semitic, as were many “pieds-noirs.”*1And I was a by-product of her belief system. Thus far I’d had no reason toquestion her prejudices and had lived in a happy oblivion ofnonconfrontation.The voice woke me up: Go! My mother thought I was crazy and that Iwas going to Israel to annoy her. My father, being a journalist, was moretolerant. But still, giving up a scholarship to Harvard? He tried to talk meout of it. To this day, I wonder what internal compulsion made me disregardhis kindly and reasonable advice.This reminds me of the inscription “Know thyself” that was written inthe pronaos*2 of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. One can imagine twoguardians of the sacred gates, swords raised, crying out: Do you knowyourself? I had no idea who I was, what I wanted, nor what the voicemeant. But there it was. I was committed to my inner world, and I wasgiving up a higher education to go pick fruit on a kibbutz in the Negevdesert.Two years later, during the Yom Kippur War, a friend and I wereserving as night sentries. To pass the time under the starlit sky, Yoav readme excerpts from the Hebrew Bible. I remember most poignantly thepassage where a voice speaks to Abraham. “Lekh lekha!” There are twoways of translating this: Go! Or go to yourself. Abraham (or Abram as he iscalled before God makes a covenant with him) is asked by the voice toleave his father’s home in the fertile Mesopotamian Valley and to ventureforth into the desert. Where to? There are no signposts in the desert. “WhereI will show you,” comes the answer. I was in a similar no-man’s-land, lostsomewhere in a dusty desert with the sounds of tanks rumbling by, waitingto be shown.In the Hebrew language are many hidden signposts—not stone gateslike the gate at the pronaos of Delphi, but written gates. The words olam(world) and ne’elam (hidden) have the same Hebrew consonants. We callthem roots. When two words have the same roots, they are connected intheir deeper meaning. You can imagine these two words as the twoguardians of the gate. One says: You are a world unto yourself; the other:that world is hidden! You want to cross our threshold? Beyond awaits thegreat unknown. That night, listening to Yoav’s voice reading the Bible, theguardians let me cross the threshold into the sacred inner space where awhole world of secret knowledge is hidden.What was I doing in the middle of nowhere, among a people I didn’tbelong to, listening to a disembodied voice reading the ancient stories? Wewere so close to Sinai that during the day we could hear the cannons roar.What if the Egyptians reached our kibbutz? And what was it that invadedme during those nights? Inner spaces were opening up, a seething world ofemotions, impressions, déjà-vu, a violet ocean of expanding contractingchaos, filled with the tohu va’ bohu*3 that I later learned was the beginningof creation.I had been sitting for two years in a darkness of intention, notunderstanding why I had traded an amazing opportunity to be, literally andfiguratively, in the desert. This was the first inkling that the darkness waslifting, but I didn’t know how or why I felt this way. I was moved, but mythoughts were in turmoil. Finally I consciously accepted that my motherwas wrong: The rational mind didn’t know everything. A deeper or highermind was at work orchestrating my destiny. I was confused, angry, andunsettled,described in Isaac’s story when hisfather raises a knife to slaughter him. That doesn’t make sense. This storycontinues to confound all the interpreters of the story. And yet, can we getad ko without a shock? The shock breaks open the pattern, and all theimages are free to configure differently. You can’t force creativity. Youthrow all the broken pieces into the cauldron, and the tides send back a newconfiguration.Saphire imagery is like that. It creates a little shock, a jolt, anunexpectedness that opens up the possibility of a new configuration. I oftengive the example of this famous zen koan:Exercise 16The Zen KoanClose your eyes. Breathe out three times, counting from threeto one, seeing the numbers. See the one tall, clear, andbright.Hear and see the one hand clapping.Breathe out. Open your eyes.This koan is so obviously shocking to the rational mind that most peopleopt out. So let’s try a softer jolt.Exercise 17The Key to a LockClose your eyes. Breathe out three times, counting from threeto one, seeing the numbers. See the one tall, clear, andbright.Imagine that you’ve just been given a key. What does thekey look and feel like in your hands?Breathe out. Find the lock to which the key belongs. Is it adoor, a casket, or something else?Breathe out. Turn the key in the lock, what do you find?What happens?Breathe out. Open your eyes.Here are some answers given by students:The key goes into the lock of a big wooden door. I open itand step into a magnificent garden.The key opens a casket, and in it I find a quill. I’ve alwayswanted to write but never dared to!The key opens my heart, and it starts to shine, I feel sohappy!The shock can be that for a moment you lose your rational mind.Exercise 18Losing Your HeadClose your eyes. Breathe out three times, counting from threeto one, seeing the numbers. See the one tall, clear, andbright.Imagine that you’re walking in a tall forest. You lose yourway.Breathe out. Grow taller and taller until your head is abovethe tree canopy. Breathe out. Stretch your neck even longerto spy above the trees your way out of the forest. Suddenlyyour head is too heavy for your neck and falls off.Breathe out. Return to your size, and run after your head.Screw it back on perfectly.Breathe out. Walk out of the forest. What do you see?What has changed for you?Breathe out. Open your eyes.Or the shock can simply mean taking a different point of view.Exercise 19The Flying CarpetBreathe out three times, counting from three to one, seeingthe numbers. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Sense, see, and feel an entangled situation you are in withother people in your family, or with friends, or at work.Breathe out. Imagine that in your DreamBody, you steponto a flying carpet. It flies off, and now it’s floating above thesituation you’ve been having a problem with. Look down atyourself and those involved in that situation, seeing theentanglement.Breathe out. Stretch your arms down, and move thepeople or yourself into new positions. Repeat this until thesituation feels more resolved and peaceful.Breathe out. Fly off on your magic carpet to visit differentparts of the world or different people.Breathe out. Return to the situation you were dealing with.Look down at it from your flying carpet. What do you feelnow? Is there another adjustment you wish to make? If so,stretch your arms down, and reposition the people or yourselfuntil you’re satisfied.Breathe out. Your magic carpet returns to the ground. Stepoff it and reenter your body on the ground. What does thesituation feel like now?Breathe out. Open your eyes.Since it is bodywork, creativity (right brain nimbleness), like muscles, mustbe exercised. Let’s say you’re interested in exploring your emotionalreactions to change. Here is a series of exercises that will stimulate yourcreative abilities when faced with change.This class was written, many years ago, by my teacher Colette.Exercise ClassFrom Twilight to the RainbowBefore each exercise, breathe out three times, counting fromthree to one, seeing the numbers. See the one tall, clear, andbright.After each exercise, breathe out, and open your eyes.1) Look at the twilight and the slow disappearance of thesun behind some hills until the total disappearance of the sun.Sense and feel the differences in your emotions.2) Look at the multicolored twilight when the sun is sinkingat the horizon of the sea. How are you reacting? What do youfeel?3) Imagine that you are in front of a threshold. What doyou do? Are you jumping over it, crossing over quietly, orstanding without moving?4) See yourself as the hero crossing the threshold on theedge of a radiant sword.5) See and know that you are between one state andanother. Feel the uncertainty and the ambivalence inhabitingyou. Describe them.6) See and live the ending of one sort of life and thebeginning of another as entering a new cycle.7) There is no bridge and no sword over the abyss. Wear abright colored turban. Feel the courage, the decision, and theenergy to jump over the abyss.In response to these kinds of jolt inductions, sensing, seeing, feeling inimages will help you to develop your resilience and fluidity. Going throughmultiple practice runs of these kinds of inductions exercises your creativity,preparing you to deal with whatever shocks your real life will present youwith. Think of this as similar to a yoga practice. Learning the postures hasmade you strong and aligned. Someone knocks into you on the subwayplatform, but your yogic experiences of strength and alignment kick in. Youdon’t fall. You realign yourself instantly and without difficulty. The Saphirepractice deals with all four of your bodies: physical, emotional, mental, andspirit. You get knocked down—betrayed by your best friend or overlookedin the workplace—and instantly a creative solution appears from thesubconscious soup to realign you. Because you have practiced “plunging,”when faced with a real shock, you will instinctively tap in, and the creativesolution will pop up. I call this Saphire practice an aerobics of the soul. Inthe face of multiple induced small shocks, your subconscious will rise up tothe occasion and show you that you are smarter, tougher, and more creativethan you realized. Saphire imagery will reveal to you who you are, whatyou feel, and what you truly think.Please don’t confuse Saphire imagery with visualization. What mostpeople call visualization is, in fact, imitation. I imitate my mother’s handmovements or my father’s expression. I imitate my skiing teacher’s moves.I follow the voice that tells me to walk down a golden path and turn right tosee an altar flanked by two angels. I’m still in visualization. But if I’masked what each angel says, I’ve moved from imitation to revelation. Try it.Exercise 20The Two AngelsBreathe out three times, counting from three to one, seeingthe numbers. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Sense, see, and feel, following a golden path until youcome to a crossroads.Breathe out. Turn right and see an altar flanked by twoangels. What does each angel look like?Breathe out. Ask each angel for advice. Hear what eachangel tells you or shows you.Breathe out. Look at what is now on the altar.Breathe out. Open your eyes.Visualization helps with relaxation. It helps with simple tasks you wantyour physical body to do. Showing the body precisely how to repair itself isthe surest path to simple healing. When it comes to complex healthproblems such as cancer, where more than the physical body is involved,the emotional, mental, and spirit bodies must be accessed. You can’t do thatwith visualization. You must access the creative force within you toreconfigure the whole situation. This requires a little shock or jolt.You are a creative being in the process of creating yourself. You startedoff as a single cell and developedinto this complex network of creativeform building. With age, like Isaac, you will auto-destruct and die. That toois a creative process. When in Genesis, on the sixth day, God creates man,He says, tov m’od, that too is very good. The sages tell us tov m’od meansthat death enters the equation. Creativity requires a death to renew itself.We will die and be reborn in a new configuration. This is hard to accept, butthe work of revelation is there to prove to you that creativity always renewsitself. If you practice Saphire imagery, you will learn by experience that youare a creative being. Trust that each time you tap into the ocean of thesubconscious, a new aspect of you will emerge. It’s like painting yourhouse, changing the furniture, or sporting new clothes; you will feelrenewed and refreshed. It will still be you, but the clock has now traveledbackward: you look so much younger, happier, and lighter! Is imaginationthe famed fountain of youth?T4The Creative ActGod wills man to be a creator—his first job is to createhimself as a complete being.RABBI JOSEPH B. SOLOVEITCHIKhe Kabbalists see the world bathed in Consciousness. They call itimmanence and give it a female name, Shekhinah. She is the receptivepool—the fluid-filled vacuum—the mirror image of her mate, thetranscendent God whose desire creates this world in His image. In asecondary play of mirrors Adam haRishon, the first human, is male/female,hybrid, like God and his consort Shekhinah, and inside Adam haRishonresides all God’s consciousness or thoughts that create this world. The wordthought in Hebrew is mahshavah. The translation leaves something to bedesired. Mahshavah is not so much an abstract thought, as a weaving*56 ofdifferent strands of thinking, creating a pattern or matrix. We could say thatall six days of creation are the matrix, the DreamField of mahshavot † 57woven within Adam. Adam has no form. Adam is an infinity ofintertwining lights, colors, sounds, dissolving forms. He/She is as vast asolam, the created world. “Adam extended from the Earth to the firmament .. . from one end of the world to the other.”1 As we have seen, olam, world,and ne’elam, concealment, have the same root letters, A-L-M, which makesthem related. For Adam haRishon, the passage from ne’elam to olam is asimple matter of breathing out with intent, expressing desire through sound.Adam names the beasts that are within his/her DreamField, and theybecome manifest.2 It is only after the fall, when God fashions clothes out ofanimal skins to cover Adam and Eve’s nakedness, that olam and ne’elamare separated. The weaving is concealed (ne’elam), and what we see is therevealed outer world, olam. Our bodies are on display, whereas ourDreamField, like mist, appears and disappears in night dreams or visions. Itis very tempting to conclude that body is all there is. But what do we lose inthe process?“In pain (etsev) shall you give birth,”3 says God to Eve after giving heranimal skins to cover her nakedness. Etsev also means “grief,” “sadness,”and “anxiety.” Creation for us humans in this fallen reality is accompaniedby all the furies of existence, pain, grief, sadness, fear, and anxiety. Ouremotions are the surface skin of the ocean we have to transpierce anddissolve for our superconscious to emerge. They are the spark that sets inmotion our creativity. Our pain leads us inward to seek what we haven’tfound in the outer reality. Turning our eyes inward is the first movementback to creativity.To illustrate what our task is, let’s return to the three-tiered model ofconsciousness presented in the introduction: the self-conscious, thesubconscious, and the superconscious. Imagine them as three concentriccircles. The inner circle, closest to us—the self-conscious—is the smallestcircle, yet seems to take up much of our consciousness. The second circle isthe subconscious. It is infinitely expandable, containing all our experientialmemories, both personal and genetic, past and future. The largest but mostremoved of our circles is the superconscious. The superconscious is ourbasic blueprint, at the center of which, radiating, or immanent to it, is oursoul made in the image of God. But we don’t see much of it, because it isobscured by the subconscious and the self-conscious. And yet without it,how do we know who we really are?To recapitulate:The self-conscious is our mental body (commonly called left brain). It isactive through the neocortex, our most recent human brain development. Itbelieves in linear time, cause and effect, and reason. It is analytical. Itworks like a binary system. It thinks in words.The subconscious is our emotional body (right brain). Located mostly in thelimbic brain, it deals with creative processes, forming and dissolving, andwith experience. It works by analogy. Its language is sensory, and whenfully developed, it speaks in images.The superconscious is traditionally located in the pineal gland, whichDescartes, who was the originator of this idea, called “the seat of the soul”or the bridge between soul and body. Recent research shows that the pinealgland, when active, emits a sapphire blue light. A sapphire blue light alsoshines in Noah’s ark, which is not just a boat having three levels but, if readas a dream, is his body illuminated by the pineal gland. Noah’s name means“rest” or “comfort.” Our superconscious is our feeling body, the mysterioussource of rest, comfort, peace, love, mercy, joy, and compassion.When all three levels of consciousness are simultaneously awoken, theslumbering Leviathan will rise, “throwing out flashes of light, its eyesradiant like the rays of dawn,”4 and you will see your illuminatedconsciousness. The big bang of creativity is its most resplendent andmysterious manifestation.As we have said before, think of your self-conscious mind as your boat.How can you, the captain, the observer (self-consciousness), be in controlof your boat if you know nothing of the storms, erratic currents, and vastpatches of garbage cluttering the surface of the ocean? Below the surface isa treasure trove of beauty, forests of variegated shapes, and beasts of manyhues. At the bottom of the ocean, like a great foundation stone, lies your all-knowing soul, the tabernacle and power center of your being. Wouldn’t youlike to get to know it? To bring up to consciousness the creativity that lieshidden in the depth of your being?In Kabbalah creativity is called hokhmah, wisdom, the first flash of insight,the dot in becoming, whose initial movement speeds outward to become aline, then a form, and eventually the totality of manifestation. “Wisdomshall be found in nothingness.”5If so, how do we learn to tap into nothingness? And like Adam and Evebefore the fall, how do we return to creating and giving birth effortlesslyand without pain? What are the maneuvers needed to clear the way back towhere we are told that only “God understands the way thereof, and Heknoweth the place thereof?”6 Is this hubris? Or is this the true challenge weare presented with on incarnating? Going through the three layers ofconsciousness, we will need to dissolve the fixed constructs on which ourdaily reality is built; sweep away pain, sadness, fear, anxiety and all theemotional blocks that obstruct the way; and mend the interconnectednessbetween all three layers of consciousness. Can returning to a larger view ofwho we really are restore our Adamic fluidity, allowing our soul’s creativityto leap and play in the waves of the subconscious ocean?Let’s start with the self-conscious mind. It is a most precious commodity,since it allows us to use reason to bring order into the confusion of ourlives. That doesn’t mean sweeping the confusion under the rug. When theself-conscious takes over and rules, without even attempting to give spaceto the other levels of being, the result, as we’ve seen, is pain. A midrash*58illustrates this.God made the twogreat lights, then, without so much as anexplanation, the two great lights became “the great light for rulingthe day, and the small light for ruling the night, as well as thestars.” Where does that contradiction come from? The midrash saysthat the moon said to God, “Sovereign of the Universe! Is it possiblefor two kings to wear one crown?” God answered. “Go then andmake yourself smaller.”7 Is the moon jealous of the sun? Can this be a case of sibling rivalry, oftwo lights, two brains fighting for the same crown? Or is this male/ femalecompetition (the sun in Hebrew, shemesh, is male, the moon, levanah,female)? And does God the father, in frustration, punish the moon? Or doesHe, like Apollo the sun god, with a burst of pure leftbrain light, shatter theright brain’s visions and voice rising out of the cavernous darkness? What iscertain is that, using the language of metaphor, the midrash acknowledgescompetition between the two brains and recognizes that the left brain shinesbrighter. The moon, we are told, is reduced to one-sixtieth of her formerradiance, both her visions and her voice diminished and devalued. Todaythat discrepancy continues unabated, and reason and science have all butkilled the visions and voice from the depths. But as a modern midrashpoints out, the dangers of the sun are not negligible. “The sun will parch theearth, bring dehydration, burn the skin of those exposed, cause cancers toerupt on human flesh.” Whereas the moon “ever-changing, ever-watched,everadmired, ever-mysterious, dazzling the moonstruck lovers, will comfortthose who gaze upon her.”8We are living in a parched world of reason. Fixed belief systems haveimmediate consequences. They block the creative abilities and healingpowers of the DreamField. Therefore, the first rule for developing creativityis getting the sun to shine upon the moon; in other words, getting the self-conscious to “hover over the chaos” of the subconscious.Here is the story of a man with pulmonary fibrosis whose breathing hadgreatly deteriorated. The doctor, wanting to take his oxygen levels, pokedagain and again at his arm in vain, attempting to catch his artery. Could it bethat pain and fear kept the artery concealed? I asked permission to do anexercise, and the patient accepted.Exercise 21Talking to Your BodyClose your eyes, count slowly from three to one.As you count, feel your arm relaxing, feel it getting heavierand heavier.It feels longer and weightless.Ask the artery to show itself.The artery immediately popped up, and the doctor was able to take herblood sample.Thank your artery.Open your eyes.This story shatters our preconceived notions of the body being just flesh. By observing the arm relaxing, we see it change from f lesh to energy(elongation, weightlessness) and, furthermore, being conscious andresponsive (the artery appears). A physical situation blocked by a rationalbelief system (sun: the body is only f lesh) was transformed by turning theeyes inward to observe the subconscious reality of the arm (moon: the bodydreams, and the body is energy), giving credence to the saying that “themoon will comfort those who gaze upon her.” Does this allow us to applythe rules of quantum theory, which states that “the greater the amount of‘watching,’ the greater the observer’s influence on what actually takesplace”?9 Does “the observer affecting the observed reality” apply toconsciousness? Notable physicists such as David Bohm and Roger Penroseand renowned neuroscientist Karl Pribram came to believe so, and coinedthe term “quantum mind.” We will see example after example of the self-conscious mind looking into the subconscious mind and affecting theobserved reality.Here is another case. A man came to see me because he had taken hisaccounting exams nine times and failed. He didn’t want to give up.Exercise 22Mirror Left and RightClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.In a mirror to your left, see the image of your failure.Breathe out. Lift your index finger to the sun, fill it withlight, bring it down to the mirror, and cut the image in two.Sweep the two parts of the image out of the mirror to the left.Breathe out. Bring the mirror to your right. See yourself inthe mirror holding up your diploma with your grade written inlarge letters or numbers.I see 80.Breathe out, knowing that you can trust your own eyes.Open your eyes, seeing this grade with open eyes.This young man took the exam and got exactly the grade he had seen in hisimagery. He achieved his lifelong dream of becoming an accountant byobserving his dreaming. Seeing the grade, his anxiety was assuaged, and hewas able to do what his dreaming had always told him he could do.Looking into the dreaming dissolves pain and clears situations thatcannot be cleared by reasoning. A young man came to see me after 9/11.His friend had called him from one of the towers and said, “I’m going todie; I love you.” Since his friend’s death, he hadn’t been able to sleep, oreat, or look at his pregnant wife.Exercise 23Sweep to the LeftClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.What is the image you see (when thinking of your friend’sdeath)?I see the tower collapsing.Breathe out. Sweep the image off to the left.Breathe out. What do you see now?I see my pregnant wife.Breathe out. See her belly growing, and growing. See hergiving birth.Breathe out. Catch the baby in your two hands as it’scoming out of its mother’s womb.Breathe out. Look at your baby, smile, and see your babysmile back.Breathe out. Open your eyes.This young man went home, slept, ate, and was able to be present with hiswife again. A few seconds of pause were enough to restore the flow ofimagery that had been arrested by his trauma.All life situations—whether physical, emotional, or mental—can beimproved by this switch toward dreaming. You will not always conquer alldifficulties, but you will transform pain and sadness.If you think I’m the lone voice in the desert calling you back to yourdreaming, you are wrong. To retrace old truths that we may have forgotten,let’s look at two versions of the tarot, an ancient and a modern deck. We’llconcentrate on two Major Arcana cards, the Empress and the Emperor. Inthe Rider-Waite deck, which was published in 1910, at the tail end of theVictorian era, the Emperor sits on a throne, facing forward, wearing armor.He is framed by a wilderness of desert and rock. His Empress sits oncushions, surrounded by nature and water, looking vaguely out into space.They seem miles apart. He evokes patriarchy, the male power that imposesits law by force. She’s endlessly fruitful and sweet but doesn’t engage him.He clearly never consults her. Now here they are in one of the oldest knowndecks, the Marseilles Tarot, first published in the fifteenth century.*59 Thisis a totally different Emperor. Relaxed, his posture is nonchalant, his legsare crossed, he’s resting against his curved throne, supported by his lady’sshield adorned with a golden eagle. He looks adoringly at his Empress, wholooks back at him. He’s clearly the Empress’s faithful knight, awaiting hislady’s wishes. “What does a woman want?” asks the old witch in theArthurian tale of “The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle.” Notbeauty, not love, not children. “We desire most from men / From men bothrich and poor / To have sovereignty without lies./ For where we havesovereignty, all is ours.” Woman wants Sovereignty! And is she queenly!She holds the scepter in her left hand and her shield in the crook of her rightelbow. She is the true power to which he defers. Who is he? The self-conscious mind, taking his orders from his queen, the subconscious mindwho, basking in the glow of his attention, becomes ever more fruitful andmultiplies, as is commandedin Genesis.10What has happened to us that we have forgotten? As illustrated by theEmperor of the Rider-Waite Tarot, the self-conscious mind, causal, rational,and linear, has unmoored itself from the subconscious mind, from thesource of playful creativity, and the result is a wilderness of desert and rock.We are no longer allowing ourselves time for jouissance, the eros andecstasy of creativity and interconnection.The old teachings tell us that to become fully awake and reachillumined consciousness, our first task is to learn to look at the Empress. Todo this, we must deliberately disconnect from the bedazzling and oftenharsh reality of sun consciousness. Instead, we must turn our eyes to thenight. I do not mean this metaphorically. I mean to actually switch our eyesand look inward. We’re learning to become like the Marseilles Emperorwho knows where creativity originates and, like a good gardener, takes hiscues from the playful deity of the garden. Similarly, the pharaohs of Egypt,the biblical patriarchs, and the fairy tale kings ritualistically cross their armsto give precedence to and bless the younger son,*60 the lesser one, the fool,the moon over the sun. To start practicing this brain switch, perform thissimple exercise.Exercise 24The Switch SignYou’re lying on your back in bed, eyes closed, relaxingcompletely. Watch the rush of images going by. Don’t try toidentify them. But remain conscious as you are falling asleep.Try instead to catch the exact moment when you fallasleep. You will notice a specific physical sign. This could bea twitch of your shoulders, a lengthening of your spine orfingers or toes. Identify this sign so as to remember it nextmorning.The dizzying array of visuals, sounds, and out of body experiences thatflood our consciousness make it difficult to remain conscious. Some of youmay find this rush of “visionary scenes that pass before us”11 confusing oreven frightening. Our bodies seem to disintegrate into images; float up intothe room; dissolve; re-form as buzzing noises, unfettered shapes, orunidentifiable faces. We are entering into the moonlit landscape. We couldsay that our mental construct of the world is disintegrating, that we arelosing control of a reality we have all agreed upon. Few researchers haveasked what this disintegration means. But remember that for something newto emerge, something has to die. The dismantling of forms is necessary forcreativity to flow. Creativity is never fixed. Sleep brings us disintegration,renewal, and creativity. It is preceded by the little death of forms. Sadly,many people lose consciousness as they cross the veil between the twoworlds, forfeiting their ability to remain conscious at all times.Can we learn to stay conscious while this is happening? Can we lookwithout fear into death, the void created by this shocking dismantling of theorder we believe is keeping us sane? If so, we will see the big bang,revelation, the first appearance of a new creation. By staying conscious aswe cross over, we are not only stretching the reaches of our consciousness,but we are also speeding up our own creativity. Creativity is like a littlechild who becomes more playful when she is paid attention to.The next step, of course, is remaining conscious while dreaming atnight. Do this before lying down to sleep: Choose a small familiar objectthat you use all the time, such as a ring. Hold it in your hands.Exercise 25Lucid DreamingClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Look at your hands holding the object, feel the object, anddecide to bring it into your dream tonight.Breathe out, and blow a zero out of your mouth, and see itbecoming a circle of light before you. In this circle, imaginethat you see your hands holding the object, and hear yourselfsaying: “I will awaken in my dream when I see myself holdingthis object.”Being awake while dreaming means that you are consciously watchingyour creativity at play. It also means that you don’t need to wait formorning to respond to the necessity of your images. Imagine how muchmore rapidly you will improve. The Emperor in you, the conscious self,makes immediate responsive choices to the offerings of the empress. Theact of choosing within the dream is a feat that seems impossible for mostpeople. Convention tells us that we have no say in how our dreams unfold,that if you see a river overflowing and you are about to drown, you can’t doanything about it. It’s how the dream goes, after all. Under such pressurefrom the dream, most of you will wake up. Don’t get me wrong: Waking upis good. But not good enough! What if, instead of waking up, you climb atree or grab the rungs of a ladder going up to the sky? What if you find thepower to calm the river? This is called lucid dreaming.You can learn to do something immediately, directly in the dream. Whyis it important to respond to the necessity of the dream, precisely when ithappens? You become present and conscious, like a martial arts master,responding in the moment to whatever challenge presents itself. If you cando this in the dream, think how much more quickly you will respond ineveryday life. Conscious choosing is what makes us different from all otherspecies. By using it in both our realities, we practice becoming present andconscious at all times. As long as our self-conscious believes it runs theshow, while, in fact, our subconscious is in charge of more than 95 percentof all our activities, we remain split and in denial. And we will continue tobe enslaved to our belief systems, emotions, and physical embodiment. Theinteraction of sun and moon, partnering in free choice and at all times, is theonly way to become fully conscious.The light of the moon will be like the light of the sun; the light of thesun shall be sevenfold, the light of seven days.12Understand this to mean that when your two brains, sun and moon,shine equally, when you are, in effect, bilingual, your inner world will becompletely rectified (tikun, correction, will have been made to the sevendays of creation, making them shine sevenfold). The dialogue between ourtwo languages will effortlessly flow and enrich our understanding of theAdamic consciousness, making possible the exploration and mastery ofolam ne’elam. We are not there yet. Now that we have brought our self-conscious awareness into the dreamtime, let us bring dreaming awarenessinto daytime self-consciousness.As I’ve said before, the moon pales when the sun rises triumphant in thesky, and your self-conscious mind floods all memory of dream states. Howis the Emperor to manifest the Empress’s wishes if he cannot rememberthem, or if he cannot consult with her during the daytime? Letting themessages from the subconscious shine through the glare of the self-conscious mind requires practice. What makes it difficult is that when theself-conscious mind is active, the eyes focus, but with the dreaming mindthey un-focus. Can these two different states coexist? Here’s what you do.Exercise 26Un-focusing the EyesClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine that you are standing on a dune looking out at theocean. See how the horizon is curved.Breathe out. See a sailboat appearing on the left of thehorizon. Watch it with focused attention as it sails from left toright on the horizon and disappears.Breathe out. Again, see a sailboat appear on the left of thehorizon. Watch it with focused attention as it sails from left toright on the horizon. When it reaches the center of thehorizon, un-focus your eyes to encompass the whole horizon.What happens to the sailboat?Breathe out. Lift your eyes up to the blue sky.Breathe out. Bring your eyes down to the horizon and tothe sailboat. Now can you see both the unfocused view andthe focused sailboat?Breathe out.Open your eyes.Understanding what the eye movements are may help: Focus brings youreyeballs closer together, un-focusing brings them farther apart in a restful,relaxed position within the eye sockets. By letting your eyes relax in yoursockets, you develop your peripheral vision, and allow dreaming to rise toconsciousness.The next time you sit with a friend you haven’t seen for a while, try it:focus on your friend, then un-focus, paying attention to the images that floatup from your dreaming. Now you are seeing your dreaming with open eyes.The images leap and rise to consciousness. They will inform you about yourfriend. If red pops up, this will tell you that she’s in an intense or angrymood; if a man pops up surrounded by pink, this means that she’s feelingenamored about someone. Learning to see your DreamField while focusingis an art of the utmost importance. It begins the process of repair—literallyre-pairing your two brains, bringing the outer and inner reality closer to apeaceful state of oneness. Let’s say you meet a potential business partner.Of course you’re going to focus on their appearance, manners, andpresentation. But what if your dreaming shows you a man walking awaywith a bulging suitcase, an image that is making you feel anxious? Whichmind are you going to believe, the self-conscious mind that likes the looksand presentation of this man, or the dream mind telling you to be aware thatthis man might steal all your information?Here is where most people opt out. The question is always: How can Itell whether this is true imagery coming from my core, or a fantasy I’vecreated out of my own needs and complexes? Fantasy is an interestingphenomenon. As mentioned before,*61 the self-conscious mind uses andtwists the language of the imagination to fit its chosen scenario. Scenarioscan arise out of an old complex, a blocked emotional memory that colorsyour reality (all people wearing black suits are thieves, or men with tans aresure to outshine me); or out of wish fulfillment, such as longing to be lovedor admired; or from unexamined belief systems (women aren’t as able asmen). In other words, you must clear the garbage on the ocean. This is alengthy process. So what do you do in the meantime?Here are three approaches: the first, of course, is asking the question.You can do that directly by turning inward, breathing out three times, andasking your question directly of your subconscious, “Is this the partner Ineed?” Then pay attention to the images that emerge. You can also ask yournight dreams.The second is using Saphire Imagery, the jolt method.Exercise 27The Angel of JusticeClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine that you are in your meadow. Look up at the bluesky. Let your eyes wander to the deepest blue in the sky.Rest your eyes on the deepest blue and call on the Angel ofJustice to come and answer your question. Call your questionout loud in the meadow.Breathe out. See the sky opening and the Angel of Justicecoming down toward you. Watch carefully what the Angeldoes.Breathe out. When you have an answer, thank the Angeland watch as the Angel returns to the sky and disappears intothe deep blue light.Breathe out. Open your eyes.The angel of Justice comes down. He’s holding a thick stick.He taps me hard on the head. I understand that he’s saying:“No!”Caution: Do not do this exercise if you’re not willing to followthe Angel’s advice. The Angel is a messenger from your soul.Only ask when you’re ready to surrender to your inner truth.The third is verification.Verification is a practice that exists in time. It is your most trusty tool.No other practice will serve you as well to begin distinguishing between theleap of true imagination and fantasy. While the practice is an ongoing effort,and it will take time before you are convinced that you can trust yourimages, there is no shortcut to finding out. It is well worth your effort tocheck whenever you can, whether your inner images are reflecting the truthof what is happening. It should be easy to elicit from your friend whethershe’s angry or sweet on someone, thus confirming that your imagesreflected the truth. You can immediately verify. But what about the possiblebusiness partner? There’s no way to know, except to keep close tabs onwhat transpires. You will have to wait and watch.To begin the process of verification, you need your DreamBook. It is inyour DreamBook that you write and date these daytime visions of yourDreamField. Verification comes when the vision is realized in daily reality.If this happens, go back to your DreamBook, find where you wrote downyour vision, or what the voice you heard said. Verification could cometoday, tomorrow, in three months, or in five years’ time. Take a red pen andmark the box yes, or write down exactly what in your vision came true. Ifyou verify often enough, you’ll start recognizing the signs of a true visionor voice. In Elijah’s experience, the voice has a specific quality. You’llrecognize it because it is very simple, quiet, and straightforward, what theBible calls a “still, small voice.”13 For instance, you hear “turn right.” Iheard this once on a main thoroughfare in Jerusalem, and I turned right. Amoment later a huge explosion rocked the street I’d just left, killing eighty-five people, and injuring many more. Or more happily, you meet someoneand the colors in the room brighten up. Since the DreamField speaks inbody language, any change in the senses is to be noted. Don’t forget towrite this down in your DreamBook. Messages can manifest through one orall five of the senses. Your verification will come when that person becomesa close friend.Your practice is to note and write, without fail, the visions and wordsthat arise in you. When verification has proven true again and again, youwill learn to trust those messages from your DreamField. You will begin totrust the creative answers the Empress offers, and you will realize that shealways speaks the truth. This intimate knowledge is an inestimable gift thatmay save your life—as it did mine—or that may save you from costlyerrors. Trusting that your subconscious is actively participating in yourwell-being is of immense benefit to you. That it will, as needed, let youknow, brings freedom from anxiety. You can build on this assurance andallow your soul to begin guiding you.Verification also serves to remind you of the thrust of creativity. Forinstance, planting an oak seed means that, barring unforeseencircumstances, it will grow into an oak tree. Verification is really aboutproving to yourself that you can trust the seed of creativity—whatever thatseed is, good or bad—to unfold as planned. Your DreamField, being theblueprint, is eminently suited to produce for your information all thedifferent moments of the seed’s unfolding, right up to its grand finale. Thatis why so many people appear to predict the future. It is already here,enfolded in the seed. As your Understanding (Binah) of what you are seeingunfolds, you are filled with Knowledge (Da’at), just as Adam knows Eve,who, as her name tells us, is mother of all living creations. Adam, youmight have guessed, is the self-conscious seed of longing hovering overEve, the subconscious, who was created from his other side (tsela means“side” as well as “rib”) as he was dreaming. His hovering, his looking,elicits her creativity, and she becomes fruitful and multiplies. Rememberthat if the seed elicited is bad (fear, rage, resentment, envy, and depressioncan spawn bad seeds and their attendant ills; creativity doesn’t discriminate)it will unfold into badness unless you respond to its necessity. This willcorrect the trajectory, and the corrected seed will grow into goodness.Exercise 28Telescoping TreeClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the onetall, clear, and bright.Imagine that you have walked deep into the countrysideand come upon a tree that impresses and attracts you.Describe it to yourself.Breathe out. Come close to the tree and put your armsaround its trunk. As you hug the tree, put your left ear againstthe trunk of the tree, listening to the life of the tree.Breathe out. Enter into the tree, and become one with thetree. You are the trunk, the roots, the branches, and theleaves. Try to feel all the parts of the tree at the same time.Breathe out. Telescope very fast into yourself: leaves intobranches, branches into the trunk, the trunk into the roots, theroots into themselves, and finally, become the original seed inthe ground.Breathe out. All of your consciousness is in the seed. Youare the seed in the ground, listening to the murmur of yourown life. What is it telling you?Breathe out. Sense and see the seed very rapidly unfoldroots, trunk, branches, and leaves.Breathe out. You are the full-grown tree, each and everypart of you imbued with the message from the seed.Breathe out. Step out of the tree. Take a look at yourself.How do you look now?Breathe out. Turn and look at the tree. How does the treelook now?Breathe out. If you’re pleased with what you see, thankyour tree, knowing that you can return to it at any time. Walkaway in your newfound body, imbued and invigorated by thelife message you heard at the core of the seed.(Breathe out. If the tree is not looking good to you, then goto the little brook nearby, fill your jug with water, and return towater your tree.Breathe out. Step back to look at your tree now. If needed,continue watering until you’re satisfied. You can also wateryourself if you don’t like the way you look.Breathe out. Walk away in your newfound body, imbuedand invigorated by the life message you heard at the core ofthe seed.)Breathe out. Open your eyesWhat does the switch of the Emperor toward the Empress require?Remember what woman wants? Sovereignty. What quality does that requireof the Emperor? The biblical text tells us that “God blessed the seventh dayand hallowed it, because on it God abstained from all His work which Godcreated to make.”14*62 God stopped creating. He removed Himself so thatwe, like Him, could start to make, to hover over the chaos and watchcreation emerging. It is this quality of the lover, humble before his lady, thatGod models for us. Out of selfless love does the lover bow and watch hislady’s flowering and responds with lyrical song and psalms of love.Surrender means a complete switch from emotion to devotion. This iswhat becoming a Kabbalist means. The Kabbalist makes room to receive(Kabbalah means “receiving”) the offerings of a more organic, lively forcewhose origins lie hidden beyond the subconscious. Would you not want tosurrender your own ego and power, knowing that by holding back andwatching, you spark the Empress’s creativity, and thus serve a greater truth?This is why I have taken a detour to talk to you about verification. You willsurrender more easily if you can see again and again that what the Empressshows you is fresher, truer, and more completely consistent with the laws ofthe universe. You will be healthier, safer, better advised, and more confidentif you can trust her creative truth and knowing. Kabbalah says that creationhappens at every moment. Thus, at every moment you must be ready tocontemplate your inner world and learn from her what your response to lifeshould be.The dialogue between the two brains quickens the DreamField. As youwatch, surrender to what you see, and behave accordingly, it will vibrate athigher and higher rates. When the two brains effortlessly communicate,when sun and moon are at parity, creativity flows like a great river “to waterthe Garden.”15In the next chapter we will see creativity at work.P5Signs of TransformationThe Grammar of the ImaginationFor in her [wisdom] there is a spirit that is intelligent, holy,unique, manifold, unpolluted, distinct, invulnerable, lovingthe good, dynamic, irresistible, beneficent, humane,steadfast, sure, free from anxiety, all-powerful, overseeingall, and penetrating through all spirits.WISDOM OF SOLOMON 7:22–24aul Klee once famously said, “A line is a dot that went for a walk.”*63In an empty universe, why doesn’t the dot stay put? Where does it thinkit is going? Is it moving for movement’s sake? Or is it moving simplybecause movement is in its nature? Creation means movement. The bigbang, the explosive appearance of something out of nothing, expands fromthe germinal dot to lines. Imagine the dot as the first image. If “image is aliving structure,”1 the explosive movement into millions of lines begins thestructure’s formation. But where do the lines stop? Is saying to the sea,“This far you may come and no farther”2 God’s prerogative? Or are we alsoequipped to say to a generative movement: stop? The conscious mind cansay it and make the movement stop by force. But willpower does not unfoldorganically, and its resulting effects can only be awkward and troubling.Here’s an example of organic unfolding. The meeting of ovum and sperm,our personal big bang, sets the initial dot-cell moving outward in manyspecific directions, until movement stops at what we have learned torecognize as a fully formed fetus, with its components of bones, toes,fingers, and openings. How does the dot-line-form know when to stop? Thisis where mystery says, this far and no farther. Ki tov, this is good. Then,once set, like the sea within its boundaries, the form (yetser) grows andswells and diminishes, until it dissolves and disappears, allowing for a newform to appear. Tov m’od, this is very good. Can we consciously set thoseboundaries? No. But our body knows how it’s done. The dot-lineform iscalled yetser in Hebrew, which also means the “imagination.” And sinceimagination (our Empress), is our body language, imagination can show us.We don’t have to use will. We only have to look and be led. Trueimagination, creativity, is wisdom. It has the ingrown wisdom to knowwhere to stop.Imagination will show us when, like the fetus, our creation has reachedits living structure and, like the fetus, is ready to manifest in daily reality.As we have said before, imagination is not fantasy.*64 You can tell thatimagination is true when it moves of its own inner volition, knowingexactly how to unfold and surprising us mightily in the process. Itsrevelations expose us to an internal balance and a unique beauty that nological mind could devise.Who then is the one who, being her own creator, knows the beginning andthe end of her own creation? And who then is he, the observer?She is a raconteur of great force and power. She spins many tales,weaving back and forth different story strands, and he, the listener, wonderswhen the full picture will emerge. Without her audience she cannotmanifest. He is the warp to her weft (the two basic components ofweaving). She sings to his moods, his questions, his hopes and dreams.Then suddenly, pulling together all the strands, she ties a beautiful knot,bows to her marveling audience and—poof!—disappears.We will not pierce her mystery, but we can learn the grammar of herinventions. Together we will discover the signs that indicate the differencebetween the fabrications of fantasy spewed up by left brain willfulness andtrue imagination at work. We will see that she shows her wisdom in waysthat you could not begin to fantasize about. True imagination surprises,amazes, enchants, and delivers to us solutions we couldn’t have thought upin a million years.The secret to watching true imagination at work is at first knowing how toremain awake at the borders of sleep. How can you stay awake if you arefalling asleep? This is an impossible contradiction. We all know that sleeperases awareness. Yet as we have seen, if you open up to the possibility thatduality(either-or) is not the only reality, that paradox (both states existsimultaneously) can also prevail, you may see your whole brain lighting up:the observer in you able to transpierce the night veil, the storyteller in youdeft in breaking through the daytime éblouissement, its dazzlement.Practice makes one great. In chapter 3, you learned how to remainawake as you are falling asleep, and how to be awake and activelyresponding in your night dreams. You also learned to observe the images ofthe subconscious mind at play during waking awareness. But we need topractice.Like Zen or Tibetan monks, we sit. But we don’t sit on a cushion(though you can do that too, if sitting in a lotus posture is more comfortablefor you). Generally, we advise the beginner student to sit on a straight-backed chair, like the pharaohs of old, with their legs and arms uncrossed.The seated position, void of slack, will keep you awake. Then, when youclose your eyes, it will be harder to fall asleep. You can imagine that, likethe young Tibetan monks in training, you have a lit candle on your head. Ifyou doze even a second, the candle will drip hot wax on your head andwake you up. We won’t do that to you. But you get the point: Stay alert asyou sink into the dream state, and dream awake.There are three techniques, three levels of tapping into the subconscious.They all require rêverie,*65 a state that is easily entered into by the simplemethod of breathing out three times slowly, seeing the numbers from threeto one.Visualization asks you to follow a simple prescribed script. It’s bestused to remind the physical body how to return to homeostasis.Saphire exercises†66 are short inductions that create the jolt, dislodgingyou from the mental and plunging you into the subconscious. They are bestused to induce transformation and are your most trusted tool for change andinner growth.Waking Dream (a paradox, a contradiction in terms) is an explorationof your DreamField. It is the long form of an exercise, but without script orjolt, and without a specific goal. To move through your inner landscape,you can start in a meadow; follow where your dog leads you; or enter intothe image of a dream you want to explore.We will use the long form of the waking dream to inquire into theparticularities of true imagination.Exercise 29A Waking DreamClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine that you are in a meadow.Start by describing to yourself, silently or out loud, whatyou are seeing.I am standing in my meadow. The sky is very blue. Whitebirds fly in a V-formation toward the right. I am suddenlyfeeling quite hopeful.Doing this with a guide is helpful, and even necessary at first. Verbalizewhat you are seeing. The guide will interact with you by asking you to bemore precise and focused about what you see and experience:How many birds are there?I’m not sure.Look again.That’s strange; I now see only three, but very clearly!Are the birds trying to show you something?Yes. I see a golden city on a hill in the distance.Do you want to go there?A man is blocking my way.What kind of a man?He’s very, very tall. I hardly reach up to his ankle.How is he dressed?All in white.What do you feel about him?I want him to lift me up . . . he does . . . he shows me thecity.What kind of a city is it?It looks celestial, all golden and shimmering. He tells me Icannot go there now, but he’ll put me on the path to reach it.What kind of a path is this?It’s a dirt path, spiraling upward. He tells me it’s going totake my whole life to reach the city.Ask his name.He says his name is Upright.So thank Upright for showing you the way.He is dissolving now and disappearing.Watch until he’s completely disappeared. Now feel yourfeet on the path. Start walking.Breathe out slowly. Open your eyes, seeing yourself onthe path with open eyes.The guide’s questions are a way of helping you to home in on your images.What are you seeing? What are you feeling? What do you see now? Whereare you going, left, right, straight ahead, up, or down? How is thelandscape? What are the colors? Describe what is happening. The guide’svoice keeps you present in your experience. The questions help you tobecome more alert, more fiercely awake throughout the dream state. Theysharpen your observation skills. Your language improves as you search forthe right words to describe what you are seeing and experiencing. In theprocess, your observing self—the left brain—becomes more refined, moresubtle, and more flexible as it plies its trade, words and sentences indescribing the creative movements of your imagination—the right brain atwork.What is the dream state? It has all the trappings of our daily world, thesix directions, up-down, left-right, forward-back; with colors rangingthrough all the shades and nuances of the seven rainbow colors; the fourelements of Earth, Water, Fire, and Air exist there; every landscape featurefrom sky, earth, ocean, land, mountain, valley, rock, tree, grass reside there.It knows day and night, wind, rain, sunshine, heat, cold and seasons. It hascabins, barns, houses, buildings, palaces, cities that are furnished like ours.And it is inhabited by animals, aquatic, mammalian, avian, and, of course,human.But it also has strange hybrid beings with tails or wings, a mix ofanimal and human, or human and angelic. Angelic beings appear and takecentral stage. We will return to those later.Dreaming reveals a world of desires, ranging from the basest to themost sublime; of reactions such as fear and anger, or blocked emotions,sadness, guilt, envy, self-hate; of feelings such as love, compassion, peace,joy, greatly intensified by sudden revelations and transformations.What it doesn’t have is concreteness, the solidity of our daily world. It lackscausality, the linearity of time, the obviousness of materiality. We could betempted to say that it doesn’t actually exist, but that would mean losing outon the dream world’s ravishing beauty and its fluidity of movement. Ourdaily world, while also captivating us by the beauty of its nature and itsfauna, constantly confronts us with obstacles, the labor of slogging throughtime and its related constraints, the heartbreak of dealing with other humansand animals, and the daily rounds of repetitive actions we must engage insimply to survive.What is the dream state about? Freedom.The dream state is unhampered by the constraints of time and space. It usesthe body as the ground from which to elevate from materiality intomovement and energy. Like a stepping-stone, the body’s language ofphysical, emotional, and mental movements draws the bridge between thisworld and the dream world.*67 When channeled by practice, the body’sdesires, reactions, and emotions become the fuel that ignites your journeyout of the material body and into the energy body and its world. The dreamstate is made of chromatic light forms, appearing and disappearing fasterthan you can blink. Becoming a dreamer means you are learning to holdthese light forms steady. You are weaving for yourself a palace of light.With practice you’ll become light solid, a contradiction in terms but truenevertheless. This will enliven the Earth part in you, the homer (matter) ofyour body, to vibrate to higher frequencies. Your Earth will become theinterface between the real world and the light world.Sit up straight, with your arms and legs uncrossed. Close youreyes. Breathe out slowly three times, counting from three toone, seeing the numbers. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine that you are in a rose garden, caressing a rose petal.I can’t see anything.Can you feel something?Some tingling in the fingertips, but I can’t see.That’s all right. What does the tingling in your fingers tellyou?For most of us it goes without saying that all the sensesare involved in thework of the imagination. That is why this noun constructed with the wordimage (form or yetser in the Hebrew) doesn’t make us pause. But for ablind person, the world is constructed through touch, hearing, taste, orscent. A massage therapist doesn’t necessarily read the body with her eyesbut more commonly through the sensations she receives through herfingertips. These people do not see with their sight sense, but they do see.They are able to reconstruct the form using their other senses.If you’re not seeing, but only sensing, just continue sensing anddescribe how that sensation in-form-s you. With practice, every sense canbe experienced using another sense, as we are told in Exodus: “And thepeople saw the voices.”3 This is called synesthesia.One student patiently endured two years of darkness. She felt but shedidn’t see. Without warning, during an exercise, suddenly revelation came.A world fully formed, baroque to the extreme and very beautiful, appearedto her. We must never push the imagination, but simply look for other waysin. Violence shatters the mirror. But patient perseverance, gentleattentiveness are what she, our faithful storyteller, responds to. Think offishing, and just wait attentively. If you cannot see, don’t despair. Just trustyour other senses.To help you unblock your inner seeing, try this.Exercise 30A Chair, a ThroneClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine a chair. Describe it. What shape is it? Whatmaterial, what color?Breathe out. Sit on the chair. Is it comfortable? What areyou looking at when sitting on the chair?Breathe out. Now imagine a throne. Describe it. Whatshape is it? What material, what color?Breathe out. Sit on the throne. Is it comfortable? What doyou see while sitting on the throne?Breathe out. Open your eyes.A chair is a simple object, easy to visualize. There’s no fancy imaginationinvolved. You’ll be surprised at how easy it is. The transition from chair tothrone is just a breath away, and for most of you, the movement fromimitation (the chair) to imagination (the throne) will be effortless.But for others, inner seeing presents a curious challenge: I can’t see, butI can imagine. They are, in fact, seeing, but they are creating a mental blockfor themselves, stretching a veil across their inner world to protectthemselves from what they fear may be too devastating a revelation.Apprehension and fear of what they’ll see can dull sensations and dim thecolors of the inner world, turning it into a pale imitation of the daily world.Remember that emotional power and its attendant hormonal release are theboost that is needed to light up the inner world. Be patient with yourself,even if you feel that you are only imagining. Don’t give up. Let yourself betricked into the plunge by trying these exercises.When I say being tricked, I mean just that. We have talked about theneed for a jolt to ignite creativity. The jolt sweeps away our habitualreactions—fear, apprehension, sadness, and guilt—that darken our innerlandscape, and suddenly we are in the land of pure color. For severalmonths, one conscientious student saw only in black and white. Color isindicative of emotion and feeling. Seeing only in black and white meant:I’m afraid of feeling! Indeed, he stayed very much in his head. One day inclass, he fainted. On being revived, he told us he had “suddenly seen in fullTechnicolor!” In other words, he was tricked into his emotional body andpassed out from the shock. This, of course, is quite an extreme reaction, andI’ve only seen it happen once, so don’t worry.Unexpected and sudden transformations in the images are the sign thattrue imagination is at work. We are going to examine different ways thatimage shows transformation. In the following exercise, the transformationsmainly occur in the color field. We have seen color transformation as youclimb the ladder of night dreams.*68 In an exercise, color transformation istelling you something important.Exercise 31The Waterfall (Formal)Close your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine that you are walking in the mountains on a warmsummer day. You hear the sound of water and follow it. Cometo a medium-size waterfall.Breathe out. Decide to drop your clothes and shoes. Wadethrough the pool of water at the foot of the waterfall.Breathe out. Turn your back to the waterfall. Let the waterrun down your back. Feel its weight, its rhythm, the pinpricksof each water drop opening up the pores of your skin.Breathe out. Turn to face the waterfall. Don’t step in yet.Let the water pour down the front of your body. See thebrilliant sheet of water. Feel its weight, its rhythm, thepinpricks of each water drop opening up the pores of yourskin.Breathe out. Step fully under the waterfall. Feel envelopedby the water, feel its weight, its rhythm, the pinpricks of eachwater drop opening up the pores of your skin.Breathe out. The waterfall enters your body through youropen pores and flows through you, clearing and cleaning yourinside body. What do you look like now?Breathe out. Continue seeing this until your body becomesentirely translucent.Breathe out. Step away from the waterfall. The sun shinesthrough your body, creating rainbow light. Does any colorremain in your body? Where?Breathe out. Wade back to the embankment. Stretch in thesunlight until you are dry.Breathe out. See that your old clothes are gone. Newclothes are there for you.Breathe out. Put them on. What do your new clothes looklike, in texture, style, and color?Breathe out. If you’re satisfied with your clothes, walkaway feeling refreshed and renewed.While the exercise is obviously meant as a cleansing, the ease with whichthe body becomes translucent, the colors that remain in the body, the colorsof the clothes all tell us whether transformation has occurred.My pants are linen, but they are black. I don’t like that.So dip them into the clear waters to wash out the black,then lift them up to the sun to dry.What color are your pants now?They’re a beautiful vibrant green.What color is your hair, darker, lighter or the same?Much blonder and longer.And the expression on your face?Serene and happy. I look much younger.The black color of the pants indicates some difficulty in the pelvic region orin the legs. We don’t know if the difficulty is physical or emotional. In asense it doesn’t matter. It is the privilege of the dreamer to keep thatinformation private. We don’t need to know. What counts is thattransformation has occurred, with the color moving from dark to vibrantgreen. Whatever the dreamer’s difficulty, you can be sure that it has beenalleviated, because the vibrant green, so fertile and alive, is telling you so.Here color is not the only sign of transformation. What is theimagination trying to tell you when it shows you that your hair has gottenlonger? Hair indicates your level of vital strength, just as it did for thebiblical hero Samson. The spontaneous growth of hair is telling you that atransformation toward more vitality has occurred. Did you willfully makethis happen? It happened spontaneously. That is what you need to payattention to. Remember that the body is always seeking to find balance andhomeostasis. Wherever there is an unexpected spontaneous movementtoward balance and homeostasis, or what the Bible calls ki tov, the good,you can be sure that true imagination has manifested. What has blondnessto do with the good? The inside world is not interested in whether you are awhite, blond person, or brown with black hair—it is only interested indarkness and light. As you practice looking inward, colors will startvibrating at higher and higher frequencies, and getting clearer and brighter,as we saw in chapter 2 with the ladder of dreaming,In the inside language,as the subconscious field gets attended to, the colors move from dark tolight (from black—which is the absence of color—red, orange, yellow,green, indigo, blue, purple, to white—which is all colors combined in thehighest vibration).Are we actually talking of physical vitality? We have left the realm ofthe physical body to enter the world of the energy body. This energy worldis a mirror image of our material world. It shows us a world reversed whereinstead of working from the bottom up (matter), it works from the top down(energy). We are used to the material world impressing its views and habitson the energy world; here it is the energy world that impresses its imagesand experiences onto the physical world. Will the impression last? Will youstay serene and happy if you find out that your partner has fallen in lovewith someone else? If you persist in believing that only the material worldis real, you will have a hard time convincing your partner to return. Butwhat if you dream yourself as beautiful, serene, and welcoming? Thelikelihood is that the partner will respond to your dreaming. Keep thesegenerative images in mind; they are the impetus to your future. Eventuallyyour belief in pain and negativity won’t entice you quite as much as yourimages. Your images will become the driving force behind your actions.You will no longer be enslaved to cause and effect. Will this change yourfuture? We will address manifestation using images, in the next chapter.What does the expression on the face, showing newfound serenity,happiness, and youthfulness mean? Passing through the veil lands you in anemotional world. Whereas in the material world a stone falling from abuilding can crush you, in the imaginal world a finger of light will shatterthe stone. This dream energy can be used by the man whose legs have beencrushed by the falling stone. Through visualizing his healing and hiswalking, he ends up on the Olympic podium. What makes the dream worldmove is not cause and effect, but pure raw emotion and feeling, the joy ofconquering the inner darkness (the stone that crushes you), and theexhilaration of achieving your goal. Does doing this in the imagination havean effect on the stone falling in the material world? We cannot answer thisquestion yet. But remember that your body knows. It will move before evenyour mind has registered that a stone is falling, and is on its way to crushingyou. You will turn aside, unharmed, as the stone crashes into the pavement.Always note the emotional content of your dreaming: If your expressionis serene and happy, if you look younger, you can trust that transformationhas occurred. Keep seeing these images of transformation, and youreveryday world will begin to conform to them.What of growing or shrinking? Let’s look at a few responses to thefollowing exercise.Exercise 32Breathing with the Tree (Formal)Close your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine that you are walking through a great orchard.There are many different types of trees. Find a tree that reallyattracts you. Look at it carefully, and describe the tree toyourself.Breathe out. Walk up to the tree. Sit under the tree, withyour back against the tree trunk, and your knees bent. Sinkyour toes into the rich soil, and feel them becoming longroots. Sink your fingers into the soil, and feel them becominglong roots.Breathe out slowly. See your breath as a light smoke. Withthe smoke, breathe out all that tires you, all that obscuresyou, and all that upsets you. See the light smoke rising up intothe canopy of the tree and being absorbed by the leaves ofthe tree.See yourself breathing in the oxygen liberated by theleaves of the tree.See this great ring of breath that links you with your tree.As you continue breathing with your tree, sense and seethe sap rising up the roots through the trunk of the tree andthrough your spine to the canopy of the tree. See its color.Continue breathing with your tree until you feelreplenished.Breathe out, lift up your toes and fingers, and step awayfrom your tree. Look at your tree now. What, if anything, haschanged? Is the tree taller, smaller, or the same size? Is theshape of the canopy the same or different? Are the leaves thesame green, brighter, darker, or a different color?Breathe out. What do you look like now?I am very tall, but the tree has shrunk!How do you feel about the tree shrinking?I’m afraid I’ve hurt it.So go to the little river nearby. Fill your watering can, andbring it back to the tree. Water the tree.The tree is growing again. Now it’s taller than me. That’smuch better.Here’s another response:The tree is huge, with a much larger canopy, and I’m astall as the tree! I’m dressed in shimmering white, and theleaves of the tree are shining.Still another:When I step away from the tree I’m all hunched up andcovered in bark and leaves, and the tree is much smaller. Ithas a hole in its trunk where I was leaning.How do you feel about being covered in bark?I like it, but I’m sad that the tree has a hole.So go to the little river nearby. Fill your watering can, andbring it back to the tree. Water the tree, and water yourself.The hole in the tree fills up again, and I lose the bark andleaves. The canopy gets larger, and the leaves becomeshinier. I’m wearing a green gown of the same color, and I tooam taller.The exercise has many purposes, the most important being for you to feelnurtured and filled up with oxygen. But for our actual purpose, we note thattall-short is another way the imaginal language communicates.In the first and third responses, changes in size (tall-short: via theshrunken tree and very tall dreamer) show us that there is a power issue.The first dreamer wants to take all the power for himself. The third dreamercannot let go of the dependency. But remember that the image is both adiagnosis and a cure. The diagnosis is not fixed. It’s already showing theway toward the cure. The dreamer being gently prodded toward a correctionby responding to the necessity of the image, the imaginal language readjuststoward the good. The trees get taller and have shinier leaves. The dreamerloves to see his tree get taller, or he gets as tall as his tree and wears morevibrant colors. Having seen and experienced these images is powerful. Thedreamers can anchor themselves in the invigorating images they’veexperienced. The cure is dynamic and builds toward a new future.As for the second dreamer, the image of him and his tree getting tallertogether shows us that the meeting has sparked an emotional exhilaration.We see this also in the shimmering colors.Past and future are not directions in time or space, but into theemotional world of memories and hopes.Exercise 33Emotional Attractors of TimeClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine that you are in your meadow. Look around; whatattracts you? Go toward what attracts you. In what directionare you going? To your left, to your right, straight ahead?Breathe out. Push on toward where you’re going. What doyou find?I’m going toward the left. I’m entering some woods. Thetrees get denser as I go deeper into the woods. It’s alsogetting darker. I come to an opening where there is a little oldhouse. I suddenly feel very frightened. I’m sure a ghost livesthere; it has the face of my mother.Has the ghost come out?Yes, it’s a very gray mass of twirling fog. It’s movingtoward me!Pull a black bag out of your pocket, and catch the twirlingfog in the bag. Pull the drawstring closed, and make a knot.Quickly reverse your steps back to the meadow. Throw theblack bag as far as you can to the right.It explodes. There’s something on the ground.Do you want to go see?Yes, it’s a photo album. I see many pictures ofmy motherin happy times. It makes me smile.Since nearly 90 percent of humans are right-handed, we are the majoritymoving into the world using our right hands. This is probably why ouremotional world reads right as the future, left as the past. The Italianlanguage calls the left hand la sinistra, a reminder that when we are calledback into the past, it is generally to deal with unlucky or unfinishedbusiness. As we see here, when the abandoned parts of our past are throwninto the future, they right themselves.As we are seeing in example after example, the imagination is consistentlyfaithful to the emotional truth. It shows us what is not right, and then, if werespond to the necessity of the images that are revealed, it will move out ofwhat is not right for us, toward what is good for us, showing that to us, sothat we can experience it fully, and never forget it.Exercise 34The Desert Turns GreenClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine that you are alone in a dry, rocky desert, runningfrom a menacing storm forming on the horizon.Breathe out. Stop running. Lift your right arm up to the sun.Feel it elongating. Feel your hand turning warm, then turningto light. Catch a ray of light, and fashion it into a bow.Breathe out. Catch another ray of light to make a goldenarrow.Breathe out. When the storm is close, shoot your goldenarrow into the eye of the storm.Breathe out. See what happens to the land when theclouds burst open, and refreshing rains wash the dry earth.The desert turns green. Wildflowers bloom everywhere. Theland is a carpet of rainbow colors. I am no longer afraid. I amamazed by the explosive beauty.Breathe out. Open your eyes.Have you seen Kurosawa’s magical film, Dreams? At one moment theorchard is barren, its branches covered in snow. Then with an emotionalintensity totally unexpected and shocking, the trees burst into full bloom,their pink and white blossoms filling our field of vision and our hearts withjoyful surprise. So it is with the imagination, the sudden turning over, thecreative upset that transforms us and our situation.So it is also when the imaginal world reveals to us other worldlycreatures, as happened to the dreamer-diviner Balaam, when the Lordopened Balaam’s eyes. “And he saw the angel of the Lord standing in theway, and his sword drawn in his hand. And he bowed down his head andfell flat on his face.”4 Are angels real? Do they truly exist, or are they justcreatures of our imagination? Does the imagination exist independently, asa real world in and of itself? You will have to decide that for yourself.All you are asked to do at this point is to give credence to this other worldand allow it to take precedence over your daily reality. Switchingallegiances is what the tarot card of the Hanged Man is showing you: Turnover! Live from your imaginal reality instead of being caught in the sludgeof the material world. The tarot is telling you that learning to trust yourimagination is part of your journey toward enlightenment.If colors clarify; if shapes elongate; if landscapes turn green and fecund;if frightful scenes resolve into peacefulness; if beings or the dreamer getlighter, more translucent, and younger; if monsters dissolve, and lightbeings or angelic ones appear; if emotions turn to expansive feelings, anger,fear, guilt, resentment, sadness effortlessly become peace, joy, love,compassion; and all this happens without forcing—then you can be surethat true imagination is at work for you. You have entered the world of theeffortless, the playful, the creative. You have slipped past the cherubholding the revolving fire sword and tricked your way back into your lostGarden of Eden.Can you then introduce back into your concrete reality your creativediscoveries? Will playfulness slip back out of the Garden to lighten thedaily drudgery of your existence? Can using the dream images change youreveryday reality?I6Symbol or MetaphorDay after day uttering speech; night after night expressingknowledge.PSALM 19:13s it important to understand what your images, night dreams, or visionsmean? In the short run, you’ll find it’s not necessary. You can remain inthe dark about their true meaning and still progress, as long as youalways respond to the necessity of your images.*69 The images will takeyou where your dreaming needs to go. But is that all that counts? Our sagessay that “a dream not interpreted is like an unopened letter.”1 Those imagesare yours; they surface from some deep hidden source within you. Whatpopulates your mind’s eye has something to do with who you are, andwhere you are on your journey. These images inform your self-consciousmind. Understanding them is helpful. All this is not in question. What is inquestion is translating images into words. In the passage from images towords, much can be lost, misinterpreted, or twisted. It is a task rife withdanger.How can talking about your images harm you? Most dreamcommentators, speaking of dream images, call them symbols. A symbol issomething that stands for something else. If you should dream of “a well, ariver, a bird, a pot, grapes, a mountain, a reed, an ox, a dog, a lion, a razor, acamel, or a donkey,”2 you are dreaming of something else. But are you?Does a donkey mean something else? And does that something else meanthe same thing for every dreamer? Should you buy a dictionary of symbolsto find out what each of those different symbols means? If you do, you’llfind out that the meaning of donkey changes from culture to culture. Willthe meaning indicated by the dictionary influence you unduly, or lead youastray? Or like the biblical scholar, should you believe that “one who sees adonkey in a dream may anticipate that salvation will come to him”?Understanding may require more care than simply slapping onto yourdream or vision a common meaning. Eric Fromm*70 talks of three differentkinds of symbols: the conventional (a flag), the accidental (a personalmemory that only has meaning to you), the universal (water is fluid andmoving). But does dream language even think to compartmentalize intovarious types of symbols, or is it a living flow? Where do symbolsoriginate, if, indeed, they exist within the dreaming?Are there not two issues here, the dream images and theirinterpretation? We are told that “there is no dream that does not have aninterpretation.”3 Does this mean the dreaming does not exist without aninterpreter? Who, then, is the you that is dreaming, and the you thatinterprets? Could it be that it is not the dream that is the problem (“Nightafter night expressing knowledge”), but the interpretation (“Day after dayuttering speech”)?Dreaming is an experience that becomes a story as soon as you tell it to afriend, dictate it into your recording device, or write it down in yourDreamBook. We could call this process a reduction: You’re reducing themovements, forms, colors, and numbers from the ephemeral quality of alight show to the manifest form of a voice or text. Let’s for the moment putaside the passage to manifestation, and let’s concentrate on the translationprocess, the switch from experience to interpretation. It all starts with anevent. To do this, imagine that you are wearing a headset that places youinside 3D virtual reality, or instead just close your eyes and breathe outthree times. Let yourself be totally immersed in the following 3D wakingdream experience.I’m walking down the street in my bright red shoes. I canclearly hear the sound of my heels on the cobbled street. Tomy right is a house with a striking yellow door. In the lock is akey. I can smell the climbing jasmine tree. It is very enticing.But to my left is a dark swirling fog that is inexorably pullingme in. It is dark, wet, and cold. It frightens me.Your fear jolts you out of your dreaming trance. Your first thought isbut a wiser part of me trusted that all this confusion was not invain.A few weeks after the end of the war I encountered a French man wholived in Jerusalem and who, in pronouncing the unknown name “Colette,”sent me rushing to fulfill the destiny my subconscious self intuited. Idescribe my meeting with Colette Aboulker-Muscat, who was to becomemy Kabbalah teacher and spiritual mother, in my first book, Kabbalah andthe Power of Dreaming.†4A year after my meeting Colette, my aunt came to visit. I took her tomeet Colette, and to my amazement, the two ladies fell into each other’sarms. They had gone to the same school in Oran, Algeria, where they grewup, as had my mother. My mother at the same school as Colette? In fact, shelived across the street from her! The voice had led me across the seas andall the way to the door of a lady who, while definitely not accessible to myconscious mind, was known to my subconscious mind. How was thatpossible?I will tell you more about how this amazing story unfolds in chapter 9.You will find out how my all-knowing subconscious spanned eight hundredyears to link my present incarnation to Colette’s ancestors.What if I hadn’t listened to the voice? My story would have continued,of course, but would I have discovered my true calling and life’s work?Would I have experienced the radical joy and wonder that would suffuse mylife from there on? I believe that I would have fulfilled my mother’sdreams, but not my own. I know that my life would have felt incompleteand meaningless. Listening to the voice, to the stories Yoav read me, andthen meeting Colette, something hidden deep within me exploded, and aflood of hitherto unknown knowledge burst onto the screen of my consciousmind.Who was Colette? To me she was one of the great loves of my life, myteacher, my spiritual mother, my home. When I was first introduced to her, Ihad no idea that she was a teacher. She sat me in front of her, looked me inthe eyes, and said, “What do you want?” To my utter surprise, unrehearsedand unexpected words came out of my mouth: “I want you to teach me howimages move and transform people.” This is what I had been ponderingsince childhood. She smiled and said, “I have waited for you a long time!”Thus began my apprenticeship. I was required to be there everymorning at 7:30 a.m., my dreams written and fully illustrated (I paintedthem). She would listen to them, then ask me to close my eyes. She guidedme with precision and mastery into my subconscious realm. The firstinduction she gave me was to draw a circle in the sky. I did, and thousandsof white birds burst out of the circle, followed by a great and powerful blueangel who told me his name was Pursel. I was mesmerized.Colette was one of the most notable female Kabbalists living in the landof Israel at the time. To the many who came from all over the world seekingconsolation and enlightenment, she was a revered spiritual teacher. Forthose of you who wonder about a woman teaching Kabbalah, it is true thatAshkenazi rabbis*5 required those studying Kabbalah to be men, over fortyyears old, and married. No women were allowed to plunge the depths. ButColette was from a Sephardic family,†6 so no such restrictions applied. Hergrandmother had been a famous teacher to the rabbis and Jewishcommunity in Algiers. Her granddaughter was simply following in herfootsteps.Colette was the last lineage holder of her family’s ancient Kabbalistictradition, a tradition that dated back to the thirteenth century, but was said togo back to the patriarchs and prophets who roamed the land during biblicaltimes. Her direct ancestor, through her mother, was Rabbi Yaakov benSheshet of Gerona, Spain. She also claimed descent from Rabbi YitshạqSaggi Nehor, known as Isaac the Blind, the first man to coin the wordKabbalah. Isaac the Blind lived in the South of France where he taught andfounded an academy of learning and Kabbalah called Posquières*7 whichremains, to this day, in the memory of Jews, a great beacon of wisdom andradiance.Shema, listen, says the main Jewish prayer. The people listened. “Andthe people saw the voices.”1 It is possible that Yitshạq Nehor was calledThe Blind not because he had lost his eyesight, but because, like the biblicalpatriarch Isaac, he listened with inner ears and saw with inner eyes. TheSheshet family’s transmitted knowledge had to do with listening, withvision, with dreaming, and with activating the subconscious to reveal itssecrets.When one reads the Bible, one is struck by the fact that every storystarts with a night dream, a daytime vision, or clairaudience. The sayings ofthe prophets of Israel occupy a third of biblical texts. How did the prophetslearn? A midrash † 8 tells us that after Isaac was saved from his fatherAbraham’s knife by an angel, he went off to study at the academy of Shemand Ever. Academies such as these were later called academies of the bneiha-nevi’ im, the sons of the prophets.2 They were learning to consciouslydevelop prophecy.My mother tried to stop my dreaming, but I had been born a dreamer.Dreaming was far too compelling to give up. I had followed it, but I hadbecome exhausted. Colette restored my joy and trust in the power ofdreaming to lead me to myself. Who was I? I was going to find out, and thetruth was grander and more magnificent than I had ever dared hope for. Iwas going to find out that dreaming is a royal road to enlightenment, andthat our subconscious holds the key to our true meaning and destiny.TIntroductionBrain researchers estimate that your unconscious databaseoutweighs the conscious on an order exceeding ten millionto one. This database is the source of your hidden, naturalgenius. In other words, a part of you is much smarter thanyou are. The wise people regularly consult that smarter part.MICHAEL GELBhis book is about the unconscious. Later I will call it the subconscious.There is a reason for this, which I will explain shortly. How is itpossible to write a book about something that, if we take its name atface value, is unknowable? As I am writing, I am using words, a consciouslanguage related to the activities of a much more recent brain developmentcalled the neocortex. But at the same time, many of my body functions areoperating sub rosa, unbeknownst to my conscious mind. We have twobrains, two different ways of processing our reality. Our more ancient brainis referred to as our reptilian brain. The two brains are like fire and water.Why has the unconscious received such a bad rap? This antagonism is notnew. Joseph’s brothers, the Hebrew Bible relates, wanted to kill himbecause he was a dreamer.*9 The ancient Greeks portrayed Apollo, the sungod, as transpiercing with his arrow of light, the womb-like darkness of thecave of the Pythia,*10 keeper of messages from the unconscious. ThereafterApollo, the clear light of the conscious mind, ruled over Delphi.The conscious mind is naturally antagonistic to the unconscious. Itprides itself on its precise observation and objectivity. It likes to separate,analyze, categorize. It uses its powerful logical thrust to establish scientificproof of things that it calls “facts.” This chair, this table, the sea are facts ofthe reality we live in. Facts depend on hypotheses, such as the types ofquestions we ask ourselves, and the points of view from which we perceiveand examine them. Our dearly held certainties may shift and change whennew questions and new hypotheses emerge. Ask Albert Einstein if the tableis really solid, and he may say that also being pure energy, it is both a solidand not a solid at all. The sea is blue, but the ancient Greeks saw it winered. Blue was not a “fact” in the time of Homer. The world was geocentricuntil Copernicus proved otherwise. A scientist will describe the rose ashaving a stem, thorns, leaves, petals, pistils, coloring, and scent, which aredifferent aspects of a totality of experience, whichtodismiss the fear: After all, it’s only a dream vision. Two things havehappened: You woke up to your everyday reality, and you switched brains.Writing the vision down in your DreamBook helps to exorcize your fear.Remnants of your dream state may still linger, but you’re now squarely inyour rational mind. You’ve distanced yourself from your emotions by theact of writing. You’re reducing a multifaceted experience to a linear mode.Unless, of course, you are a painter who paints your dreams, as I did formany years, or a poet whose words can still elicit some of those dreamvariegations.In Nature’s temple, living columns rise,Which oftentimes give tongue to words subdued,And Man traverses this symbolic wood,Which looks at him with half familiar eyes.4CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, “ECHOES”“Words subdued” are our imperfect ways of translating the experience ofthe “living columns.” The woods, having been named, no longer vibratewith life and are now merely symbolic. But something halffamiliar lingerson in the memory of the experience.Do not confuse the experience (the living columns of trees) with itsinterpretation (words subdued). There are no symbols in dreaming. Theshivering of raindrops on your skin, the wet fog, and the scent are notsymbols. What turns them into symbols? Your rational mind, trying toreduce a mystery to its condensation. The red shoes are not symbols; theydo not represent something other than shoes. You are wearing them, andyou can hear the sound of your heels tapping on the cobblestone road. Whatif, in your daily life, you saw red shoes in a shop window? The colorappeals to your senses, you can see yourself walking in the red shoes, filledwith vitality, passion, and sex appeal. That sense of liveliness is what makesyou buy the shoes. The word “symbol” doesn’t apply here, but other wordsmay come to mind: “morphological similarities, dynamic analogies and allsorts of word games”5 and, as we will see further on, metaphoric clusters ofideas.How does a dream or vision talk to us? Think of charades. Try to saysomething using only images. The dream world speaks to us by pullingfrom its memory bank, the color, form, specific body part that our dreamingtells us is—or needs to become—vital and dynamic in the here and now.What drives the dreaming to have you go on that small but intense journey?Your desire to move toward the radiance and power of that bright yellow.The fact that the yellow is on a door tells you that you have the power tocross a new threshold, so long as you take care of the emotional swirlpulling you back. You do this by responding to the necessity of the dreamimages. Freeing yourself from the swirling fog opens the path back to theyellow door. Dynamic, creative, and life driven, your dreaming seeks the kitov, the dynamic living balance of your four bodies (physical, emotional,mental, spirit) within the outer environment. It doesn’t rest in any fixedform or meaning. It states with immediacy what or where it is now, andwhere it needs to go. Whereas, by defining the dark swirl as your shadow orid,*71 you fix the situation in your mind, and it becomes yet anotherobstacle to the transforming movement of dreaming.Again, think of the act of dreaming as a magnetic pull, driven by yourprimitive urge to survive in an optimum state. The dreaming question inyour mind is like the yud, the first letter of the tetragrammaton. It is the bigbang in your creative field, the magnetic north that will galvanize all thedifferent forces responding to the call of your question. The key and itsproper lock move to interpenetrate. The powerful yellow conjoins with thedoor that needs to be opened. The scent of jasmine, pure, strong, andrefreshing reaches out sensationwise to match your need for renewal. Theswirling fog, the dark, the wet, and the cold pull you back toward theemotional black hole you are trying to escape. Paint your dreaming, danceit, sing it, write a poem. It will all become clear without analyses. You knowthe meaning of your dreaming, like Adam knew Eve. You know that youneed to free yourself from the pull of the fog and dance away toward theyellow door. You do not need an interpreter. Your only question is, What iskeeping me from my bliss?*72You are the only one who can answer that.Don’t pull away and distance yourself from your feelings. On the contrary,be your feelings. Be ehyeh asher ehyeh,6 I am that I am, the name Godidentifies Himself with when Moses inquires at the burning bush. It alsomeans I will be what I will be. Be your dreaming, and you will becomeyour dreaming. If not, you lose the momentum and stay stuck in the darkfog, in exile from what your red shoes and the yellow door are promising.We will return to this with the issue of manifestation.What associations do you have to red shoes? You can cluster them around acentral bubble that says: red shoes.Feet, ground, grounding, dynamism, passion, courage,warrior, rebellion, bull, matador, the Sun King, sensuality, sex,joy.You can go on and on associating (associations are not logical connections,they come from emotional connections, established within thesubconscious), until suddenly a story begins to unfold in your mind. Dreamforms come before story. They emerge from an emotional imperative withinyou that we could call imagination, or the urge to form. You don’t yet knowwhat the story will be, but the images rise like good bread and find theirown configuration.From there to saying this is symbolic is a fine line most people cross attheir peril. You cannot arbitrarily assign to a cigar the meaning of penis, orto an apple the meaning of sin. If you affix an assigned meaning to animage, you are stifling its genius. You are interpreting, telling the dreameror yourself that this (the cigar or the apple) means that (a penis or sin). Thedifference is so subtle that even now you may not understand the danger ofwhat you’re doing. Transposing those dream images into the language ofcausal analysis (this means that) defeats the purpose and creates false beliefsystems. And yet how else can we do it? Your words preserve the memoryof your images. Without words, your images tend to dissolve and disappearback into the flow of dreaming. The only language that remains true to themission of your images is one of poetry that retains the layered truths of theimage, or else one of literal description. The subconscious is your creativefountain, your imagination, the motor for your images. It is moving,flowing, transforming, and open to many possibilities—and to trulysafeguard its qualities, your language must reflect the freedom of yourdreaming. If your words fix the dreaming by putting its images into littleboxes called symbols, you will unwittingly be muzzling your imagination.By instilling in your mind false belief systems (a cigar is a penis, an apple issin), you are effectively repressing your creative flow.Are you someone who comes out of a movie and likes to dissect andanalyze what you saw? Or are you someone who likes to let the imagesresonate within you and prefers not to talk about what you saw? Let usreturn to the literal meaning of the images. When I wear my red shoes, I ampulled right, but the dark swirl pulls me away to the left. I want to return tothe yellow door and the fragrant jasmine tree. Respect what the dream isshowing you. Stay with the dream as it is, and live it. Then, when you speakabout it, stay close to what you see and sense. Describe. Don’t interpret. Orat least keep your interpretation as close to the dream as possible. Joseph,the great dreamer of the Bible, does just that when he opens the dreams ofthe baker and the cupbearer, who have been thrown into prison byPharaoh.*73 He is staying close to the images. The biblical text uses theword “patar,” interpret. The sound is similar to “patah,” open. The twowords are homophones (they sound the same but are written differently),which suggests thattheir meanings are interrelated and linked, like puns ina dream. This points to a different understanding of the word “interpret” asit is commonly used in English. Don’t stray, embroider, or associate. Stayclose to the dream!Do not close up your dream. Do not reduce it. Instead, open it up to itsliving potential. By staying close to the literal meaning of the dream, youembody the attitude of the Marseilles Tarot Emperor who lovingly andrespectfully watches what his mistress, the Empress, does.You can do the same when opening the dreams or visions of others.Here is the cupbearer’s dream:Behold, there was a grapevine in front of me! On the grapevinewere three tendrils. And it was as though it budded. Its blossomsand its clusters ripened into grapes. And Pharaoh’s cup was in myhand, and I took the grapes, pressed them into Pharaoh’s cup, and Iplaced the cup on Pharaoh’s palm.Joseph said to him, “This is its opening. The three tendrils arethree days. In another three days Pharaoh will lift up your head andrestore you to your post.”7As you can see, Joseph stays close to the dream, and to the obviousquestion behind the dream: Will I be reinstated? Behind that question liesthe implicit desire to know the timing: When will I be freed? We havespoken of analogy and similarity: Key and yellow are both saying I have thepower to open this door. Red shoes say I have the dynamism to resist thedark fog and follow my bliss. Here, beyond the very literal meaning of thedream (the cupbearer’s task is to serve Pharaoh his wine cup), there is agrapevine that is taking on a life of its own. It is doing what all grapevinesdo, budding, blossoming, and producing grapes, but so fast! In the blink ofan eye, the grapes are ready to be plucked. Timing has accelerated, and wecan’t help but be drawn to the only number in the dream: three. Numeralsare used to indicate time. Here you would be justified in accusing Joseph ofsymbol making: Three tendrils mean three days? And yet, what is Josephdoing? He is responding to the unasked question of the dreamer. He issticking close to the dream: The grapevine blossoms very fast. He could justas well have described three as dynamic, or as a new perspective. Here,instead of symbol making, we have an example of metaphor, the hinting ofanother meaning beneath the obvious one, a clustering or layering of ideas:three branches, three days. Images speak to us of a present unfolding in themoment, of a future in the making: Indeed, three days later, the cupbearerwas reinstated into Pharaoh’s good graces.Here’s another dream. Like the dreamer in the following dream, alwaysspeak about your dreams, exercises, or waking dreams in the present and inthe first person singular.I’m standing on dry red earth interspersed with white roots. Atmy left are two fat, spotted, white, gray, and black snakes,coiled up and hiding their faces. On my right is another snakealso coiled up, its face hidden. I’m not too uncomfortablebecause they are hiding their faces, but snakes areunpredictable. An older man stands to my right. He’s a calm,genuinely nice person. He’s a tour guide. This man says, “Oh,so they are snakes.”The dreamer didn’t understand her images. but she did understand thatshe should respond to the necessity of the dream:I water the dry land. The land turns green. The three snakesslide away in the green grass. The man takes my hand andsays, “Don’t worry.” Where the snakes had been coiled up arenow empty patches in the grass.I go and stand on one of those empty patches. I feelenergy rise up in my body, burning away whatever blackenergies were in me.Responding to the necessity of her dream helped the dreamer arrive at amuch more comfortable place. Her worry was eliminated, and the blackenergies in her body were burnt away. Also, the snakes were gone. The manheld her hand. The images appeared peaceful and harmonious. She stilldidn’t understand her dream, but having reentered the dream and lived itsnecessity, she experienced how this cleared away something hidden in herthat had been disturbing her for a long time. Did she really need tointellectually understand what her dream meant? No. In fact, finding outwhat the dream meant before responding to its necessity might be animpediment. Her self-conscious mind could get in the way. Afterward, ofcourse, understanding cannot hurt, as long as the dream opening is alwaysin the service of the dream’s flow and search for life, balance, and harmony.Let’s give it a try:Let’s stay close to the images and their patterns: a man and a woman, twosnakes on the left, one snake on the right, 2 + 1 = 3 snakes, hiding theirfaces. What does this remind you of? What “dynamic analogies” does itelicit? The story of Adam and Eve presents similar patterns (morphologicalsimilarities), except that here there are three snakes, and it isn’t Adam andEve, but the snakes that hide their faces. The theme is neverthelessreminiscent, with an added twist.Becoming the secondary dreamer of this dream, I open the dream for theoriginal dreamer:As the secondary dreamer of this dream, I feel the snakes area coiled-up power that I associate with my sexual energy.Snakes give me goose bumps all over my skin, like sex does.I am ashamed of some past coupling revealed through thenumber two. I feel strong sexual energy in my future, thesnake to my right, and would like to engage in a newcoupling, but shame in the shape of the snake hiding its faceis still between me and the man. The dry earth shows me thatshame has eaten away at my life force. But the number three(three snakes) is a dynamic number and tells me that I canvery quickly change the situation. The calm, wise man istelling me to look on the snakes as a tourist would (he’s a tourguide and you’re in transit), with detachment. Have no fear;they’re only snakes.After the dream opening, the original dreamer revealed that she had had anextramarital relationship that brought her much shame. She was trying tofind a clear path back to her husband.Nowhere in these dreams have the dream openers even suggested that thedream is symbolic. In fact—they follow the truth of the situation closely.The numbers are not symbolic; instead they carry a compacted meaning.Unpack them, and you’ll be able to see them as shortcuts to the meaning thedream is trying to communicate. Two is a duality, or a coupling. Three takesthe dreamer out of the two into a new possibility. Three is a new perception,like two eyes focusing on a third point. Three is fast, because if you drawthe geometry of three you get a triangle. The triangle, like the prow of aship, cuts through and adds quickness to its attributes.If I were to say snakes are a symbol for intestines, or red shoes meanshame, my attention would be drawn away from the true contextualmeaning of the images. Insisting that images are symbolic blocks thedream’s raison d’être, which is to have a transformative dialogue with you,the self-conscious mind. By responding to the necessity of the dream, youhonor the images and allow the subconscious to reconfigure toward life.And indeed, the dreamer came out of this exchange feeling relieved ofshame and was able to resume her life with her husband.Compare your thinking in symbols to a relationship problem. You areangry with your spouse. Instead of calmly mirroring back (describing) toyour spouse what you are feeling when they do what offends you, youremain stuck in your reaction. You use an expletive: She’s a bitch, or he’san ass. In a way, you’ve objectified the other. You’ve stuck your spouse intoa little box called bitch or ass. Your spouse, no longer the loving gracefulhuman being you fell in love with, has now morphed into something other,a beast, or an object. See the danger? It will forever corrupt and obscureyour primary experience. So many relationships flounder at this juncture!How can one love or even respect another when reducing himor her to alabel, a word, a symbol, a little box! The only way to repair (re-pair, bringback together) is to return to the dreaming.Exercise 35Stepping Into Someone Else’s ShoesClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Visualize that standing, facing you, a few feet away, issomeone with whom you are currently having some difficulty.Breathe out. Imagine yourself stepping out of your body,walking in your DreamBody over to that person, and going tostand in his or her shoes.Breathe out. From this new vantage point, look back atyourself. How do you see yourself? What do you sense andfeel?Breathe out. What do you say to the “you” standingopposite? Say it, hearing yourself saying it in this person’svoice.Breathe out. Return back to your own body, and look backat the person you just left. What, if anything, has changed?Breathe out. Open your eyes.There is nothing symbolic in loving. Loving requires imagination. To loveyou must be able to flow into the other, step into their shoes for a moment,or else step into their dreams. Dreaming yourself into another for a momentallows you to live the other’s experience with total acceptance. Becoming asecondary dreamer for a moment, you embody the other or their dreaming,and you learn from direct experience who that person is. You’re effectivelypracticing unconditional love.Your loved ones are not the only ones who risk becoming symbols, withlabels such as loser, victim, or bore, affixed to their life force and slowingthe flow. You too may be caught in what others think of you, or in your ownfixed ideas about yourself. To restore the creative flow, you need to returnto your primary language. Dreaming shows us that we are live,multifaceted, dynamic creatures. Let’s return to that dynamism by trying toembody different life forms, not only for the aerobics of it, but also for thesheer joy of getting to know other life forms.Exercise 36Becoming the Creatures in the GardenClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine that you are resting on a garden bench, watchinga lizard resting on a wall.Breathe out. Jump into the lizard’s body, and become thelizard. Look through its eyes, feel through its pores, move as itmoves, stretch your long tongue out to catch and eat what iteats. Now rest again, basking in the sun.Breathe out. Jump out of its body back into yours. Feel thedifference.Breathe out. Jump successfully first into a hen, then into abee, and into a butterfly.Breathe out. Jump into the body of a bird and fly off.Experience how it feels to fly and see the world with eyes oneither side of your head, and look down on it from above. Flydown to the ground to pick at grains with your beak. Jump outof the bird’s body and back into your own.Breathe out. What has changed for you in your body, yourperceptions, your emotions?Breathe out. Open your eyes.By dreaming another life form for a moment, you are living the fullcomplexity of its existence. “An image is worth a thousand words,” sayscommon wisdom. Or as Samuel Johnson puts it, metaphor “gives you two(or more) ideas for one.” A cat curled up in an armchair purring is an imagecompacted with many layers of meaning suggesting a warm home, cuddlingup, pleasure, lovemaking, but also thrill, danger, and wildness. A goldenchalice shining in a ray of light evokes a white dove, transcendence,heaven, or, just as convincingly, wine, blood, the flaming heart, and love—two seemingly opposite meanings, yet both are connected by livinginterwoven threads of meaning. How can the losing of self and burningdesire coexist? Aren’t they contradictory? Yet they do coexist in the sameimage.The following story shows you how the sages understood dreaming.A man had a dream, and he visited twenty-four different dreaminterpreters residing in Jerusalem. “And that which this one interpreted forme wasn’t the same as that which the other interpreted to me. Rather, Ireceived twenty-four different interpretations of the same dream.”8 Not veryuseful; too much is too much, you’ll say. And you’re right, to some extent.How can the dreamer orient himself? There are many ways of looking at adream or a waking vision. All are meaningful, but not necessarily relevantto you today. Pay attention to the one opening that does resonate for you.From one dream image to many different futures, it is your choice to followthe road that attracts you the most. Remember that we are influenced by theinterpreter’s words. If their words stay close to the dream, if they speak tothe ki tov, to the movement toward life in you, if they resonate for you, thenlisten. Choose your dream interpreters wisely, for “the dream follows themouth,”9 say the sages. The words that have entered your ears willinfluence how you see and feel the dream image, which, in turn, will drivemanifestation.Image, collapsing many meanings into its core, is, by nature, a metaphor,able to transcend duality and to capture the paradoxical nature of life. Fromthe image core, your mind is free to travel down the many different avenuesof meaning that are offered to you. This is where you are the master: Nodictionary will be able to tell you what most attracts you just now; only youand your subconscious know what resonates.But this is also where, like most people, you might get lost. You want tobe told what to do. You want facts. Facts are scientific and comforting: Thechalice is a container, nothing more. If the definition of chalice beginsmorphing, what can you trust? But quantum physics has begun to dismantleour convictions: Light is not a wave or a particle; it’s both. Living in aparadoxical world requires some adjustment. We must let go of certainty, ofour need for control. In the inner world, there are no facts, since the imagehas not yet manifested. And if you, like the scholars, believe that the innerworld is a nonreality, it’s an easy step to convincing yourselves that imageshave no meaning. We’ll come back to that when we tackle manifestation.The chalice is not a fact, but it is the truth. A truth that shimmers with manymeanings, all emotionally powerful, revolving in the mind like the sword ofthe angel guarding the entry to PRDS, paradise. To enter, you must acceptthat your images are not one-dimensional, but have revolving meanings,and that you yourself are a many-splendored being, living in emotionalworlds populated by multifaceted images. You are a living, walkingmetaphor. How do you orient yourself? Remember the three tests you mustpass to enter PRDS, the garden, and find the treasure.*74P’shat, your story line: Recognize your story line, but don’t get caughtin it, or you will become a victim of your own story.Remez, your patterns: Pay attention to them. They will reveal what isreally on your mind and what is blocking you.Drash, your question: What is your most pressing question of themoment? It is your question that will propel you past the angel, intothe Garden.Sod, your treasure: There you will encounter Sod, the secret hiddenwithin your dreaming, that reveals what you must do and where youmust go to find your bliss. This is what will set manifestation intomotion.Exercise 37Getting Past the Angel Guarding EdenClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Reverse quickly through your life story, recognizing itsrecurring themes.Breathe out. Go forward, noting all the incidents whererepetitive patterns reappear in your story. Note how old youare and in what location they occur.Breathe out. Go back again through your story, visitingeach location and sweeping the recurring patterns to the left.Breathe out. Return through each cleared location totoday.Breathe out. Orient yourself. What direction are youfacing? Breathe out.Turn to face east. Walk toward the risingsun.Watch the revolving lights of the blazing sun.Breathe out. Come close to the angel guarding the way.Whisper in his ear the one word or sentence that will let youthrough.Breathe out. Walk into the Garden, and find your treasure.Breathe out. Thank the angel as you leave the Garden.Return to your everyday life. Keep the knowledge of yourtreasure preciously in your heart, to orient yourself toward thefuture you desire.Breathe out. Open your eyes.The man who received twenty-four interpretations to his dream reportedthat all twenty-four interpretations came true. How is that possible, alltwenty-four? And if images aren’t real, how can they manifest results in ourreality? This is the next question we need to address.PART IITaming the LeviathanInteractions with the SubconsciousMWe can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinkingwe used when we created them.EINSTEINy mother always said I was dreaming my life away. She was right. Iwas not so impressed with the way the real world was muddlingalong. Yes, progress was unfolding at a dizzying rate; yes, we werebenefiting from giant technological leaps forward. We had running water,anesthetics, antibiotics, planes, computers, and cell phones. But what isprogress, if so many around me were still battling to find a sense ofdirection and meaning in their lives, still floundering in relationshipproblems, their health issues, even basic survival? In fact, the issues pilingup today appear far more intractable and threatening than they ever were.Setting out to prove to myself (if not to my mother) that dreaming affectsoutcomes in reality, through my continuing dialogue with the subconscious,I learned to address the problems confronting my society, family, friends,students, and myself. I have outlined for you the methodology to plungeinto your subconscious and find the creative answers that can enhance orradically change your life. Now you must put those lessons into practiceand face your very own Leviathan, the great beast that thrashes to and frowithin you, manifesting your untamed emotions and memories that need tobe acknowledged and weeded out. The chapters that follow are ways foryou to deal with your beast while developing different aspects of your life,using dreaming. How do you manifest your heart’s desires, the abundance,the joy, and the fulfillment you dream of? How do you clear intractablecomplexes or ancestral, repetitive patterns? How do you return to yourinner source, and rediscovering the playful creative child within you? Howdo you heal your relationships and return to the radiance of first love?When time poverty seems to be a daily and ever more exhausting problem,how do you become the master of time? When your body loses hope, whenit gets ill, can you speak to it, will it hear you? If you remember that thelanguage of the subconscious is image, then a whole new vista ofpossibilities opens up for you. Knowing how your dreaming can directlyaffect your everyday life, wouldn’t you like to explore its possibilities?Our world is one vast organism or ecosystem. Call it a giantDreamField. These chapters will teach you to use your subconscious in apractical way and will help you to situate yourself where you belong, withinits beneficent flow.W7Playing with ManifestationDreams pass into the reality of action. From the actionsstems the dream again; and this interdependence producesthe highest form of living.ANÄIS NINhat is reality? Should you consider your dream images as actualworlds that exist in an etheric other reality? Or as pure fantasy—what some scientists have called “garbage of the brain”? “Theimages of the dream . . . are figuratively true, but literally false.”1 Are yourdream images literally false because they do not exist in the real world?Your self-conscious mind will agree with that statement. But will yoursubconscious mind? While you are dreaming, your images are completelyreal to you; you don’t question their validity. This dichotomy is worthobserving.Once Zhuang Zhou*75 dreamt he was a butterfly. Uponawakening he didn’t know if he was Zhuang Zhou who haddreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that he wasZhuang Zhou.Which world is real? In ancient Vedic literature, what we call the real worldis seen as maya, an illusion so powerful it can make us believe in itsabsolute reality. “The wise behold with their mind, in their heart, the sun,made manifest by the illusion of the Asura.”2 The Veda is suggesting thatwe can see through the illusion (the Asuras are nature deities) to reach thetrue reality, called here the sun. This is how the Zohar puts it:To read the writ of the Torah literally is akin to telling someone thatthey are a magnificent cloak, as if the person is nothing more thanwhat they wear. Certainly, a body exists behind the cloak, andcertainly a soul behind the body . . . and within that soul yet another,and another.3Understand the writ of the Torah (the five books of Moses) as the story line,the everyday reality. The Zohar is basically pointing us in the samedirection: Beyond the illusion of the cloak is the body, and beyond the body,the soul, and yet more soul. The word “reality” loses its meaning, since thereal reality is at the opposite spectrum from appearances. Let’s rememberthat Kabbalah defines four worlds, Emanation, Creation, Formation andManifestation, all real in their own different ways.To review:Emanation, Atsilut, is the big bang, the dot of the letter yud in God’sname, from which all creation emanates. Call it desire.Creation, Bri’ah, is the expanding dot, the matrix of space-time. Call itimagination.Formation, Yetsirah, is the ephemeral trying on of forms. Call itdreaming.Manifestation, Asiyah, is the manifest compound of the other threeworlds. Call it reality.Saying that only this reality is real blocks a far deeper truth that is bestexpressed by Einstein’s famous formula, E = mc2 . How does themovement from matter to energy, or from energy to matter happen?Between Zhuang Zhou and the butterfly there must be somedistinction! This is called the transformation of things.Dream images are part of Yetsirah, the world where transformation isoccurring. Are your dream images figuratively true? Only in the fugitiveappearance of the image! A table is a table in the dream but might suddenlytransform into a cloud. The cloud then becomes “figuratively true” as longas it stays a cloud. Certainly, at this level, your images are not yet aboutmanifesting, but about trying on possible formations.When do they become manifest? The world we live in (Asiyah), that wecall real, is a consensual world. We all agree that a table is a table. We clingfor dear life to this definition of table as real. If the table were to begin tomorph, we would be seriously thrown off balance. We forget that life offersus many examples of transformation in the manifest world (water becomesvapor, becomes a cloud, becomes rain, turns to ice, returns to water). Thepassage back to dissolving forms is seen as dangerous for our sanity. Andyet both the Vedas and the Zohar are suggesting that the dissolving of formsleads us back to truth, a reality far beyond what we call reality.Maybe the word “real” is the problem. If we eliminate it, we are free toconsider the power of our inner images to propel us forward. Does thatimply that visualizing a table means you can make it materialize? Will thetable turn up in your dining room, either by a sleight of hand or by a seriesof events that culminate in the table of your dream manifesting at yourdoorstep? Some of you would call this magical thinking. Yet does anythingget done in this world unless you have already dreamed it?While “classically, the image is always defined by reference to the real,” theHebrews perceived it otherwise. They saw the dream as “God revealingHimself to men by imagesand figures,” the dot of the yud*76 descendinglike a tail of fire into the worlds of structure and form to finally manifest aworld objective to the eye and touch. If the world’s destiny is birthedthrough God’s imagination, our own destiny must also be inherent in ourimagination, made in the image of God’s imagination. Like God’s, ourimagination must be able to carry the phantasmagorical images or scenariosof our dreams or visions into objective reality. How do we know that? TheBook of Genesis shows us the Creator creating the world in six days, thenresting on the seventh:On it God abstained from all His work, which God created to make.4One way to understand this cryptic phraseology is to say: God stoppedcreating so that “to make” (la’asot in the Hebrew) or manifest could nowhappen. Or another interpretation: His creation, man, could, in turn, learn tomake, to manifest. Creation ex nihilo (bara Elohim, God created) is God’sprovince, but man can learn to make, to use the existing created forms toprocreate, to replicate, to compose. God removing Himself allows man toplay with forms, and to assemble and sew together the garment of theobjective illusion that is our world. A dream interpreter is called a PTR,poter, whereas a tailor is called a TPR, tafar,*77 with the same lettersforming a different configuration, suggesting that assembling and sewingtogether different forms is the work of a dreamer.In the Garden of Eden, the passage from dreaming to making isinstantaneous. Adam speaks the names of the animals, and they appear. Byeating of the forbidden fruit, Eve makes a new world and becomes themother of all living (which is the meaning of her name, Havah, in Hebrew),but she loses the instantaneous ability to manifest that Adam enjoyed. “Inpain shall you give birth.”5 She transmitted to us the freedom to make butforfeited for us the instantaneity that we can only recover by returning tothe Garden. How do we do that?Let’s sit a moment with the old belief system that dreaming is unreal.The moment you say the dream world is unreal, you dismiss itsextraordinary creative power. What is dreaming? Whether by night or day,it is your creative ability to la’asot,6 your ability to make yourself and theworld around you. Your dreaming is a fact in motion, since you are creatingyourself at every moment. You are your dreaming. Your body, youremotions, and your thoughts are all rising out of the creative output that isyou constantly making yourself. “By breaking with the objectivity whichfascinates waking consciousness, and by reinstating the human subject in itsradical freedom, the dream discloses paradoxically the movement offreedom toward the world, the point of origin from which freedom makesitself world.”7So let us agree that all four worlds are real. From energy to matter andfrom matter to energy, don’t block the movement with false belief systems,for it will definitely curtail your ability to manifest. Keep the fluidity goingby respecting the offerings of your imagination and allowing the dreamingto play, and to try on different forms and combinations. “All the breaks youneed in life wait within your imagination. Imagination is the workshop ofyour mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment andwealth.”8 If so, why do some images materialize while others don’t?Exactly as a worker in his workshop will try, and reject, and try somethingdifferent until he finds the right combination, so too in the space of theimagination. A certainty, a knowing that this is it will arise in you when youreach the right combination. And the excitement will push you onward toaccomplish and manifest.What happens if even then, doubts arise? Qualms about your ability to bringyour ideas to fruition, worries about taking a risk, trepidation about whatothers may say, and procrastination are all ways of diminishing the value ofyour dreaming. Your lack of self-confidence will block your creativity andparalyze your efforts to bring your dreaming to fruition. Worse, since “allthought has a tendency to clothe itself in its physical equivalent,”9 you willmanifest your worst doubts, fears, and worries. And when they come true,you’ll feel justified in saying, I knew this couldn’t work or I knew this wasgoing to happen! Yes, you did! Because you chose to stay with yournegative images and not to rectify or clean out your fears, doubts, andworries. Think of them as nonrecyclable waste. They will not biodegrade bythemselves. You, the self-conscious one, will have to decide to changesomething. You will have to open up your subconscious like you do acomputer program and consciously clear the glitches. You are far morepowerful than you realize. At each moment, you are seeing your imagesbecoming reality, only those images may be the negative ones that makeyour worst fears come true. Time to let those go, so that you can manifestyour true creativity.Exercise 38Getting Rid of Fears, Doubts, and WorriesClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Sit at an open window. Have on your lap a box ofmanycolored balloons. Choose a balloon that has the color ofyour fears.Breathe out. Blow your fears into the balloon and knot thetail of the balloon.Breathe out. Choose a balloon that has the color of yourdoubts.Blow your doubts into the balloon and knot its tail.Breathe out. Do the same for anxiety.Breathe out. Now you have three balloons whose colorsyou don’t like. Let them float out of your window.Breathe out. Grab three rays of light and using them asdarts pop the balloons. See the deflated balloons beingcarried away to the left by the wind and disappearing.Breathe out. Now choose balloon colors you like forsuccess, abundance and joy and whatever else makes youhappy. Blow up your balloons and let them go.Breathe out. Watch all your balloons rising up into the sky,colorful and lively.Breathe out. Open your eyes, seeing this with open eyes.Breathe out. Open your eyes, seeing this new image withopen eyes.You may be one of those lucky souls whose self-confidence is strongeven in the face of failure. But for most of us, self-confidence is dependenton what we can manifest, which is a vicious circle, as you can onlymanifest what you believe in. If you believe in your own doubts, you willmanifest failure. If you see yourself charging forward, confident of success,you will open the way toward a good manifestation. People equate yourworth with what you manifest. Therefore, it’s up to you to convinceyourself of your own worth. Put yourself in the shoes of your defenselawyer making the case for you. If you do not know your own worth, howcan others see it, or if they do see it, how can they convince you of it?Exercise 39The Value of WorthClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Ask yourself, who decides your worth? Is it you, yourparents, your siblings, society, peers, your inner self, God?Breathe out. Imagine yourself as a newborn baby and lookinto its eyes. What is its worth?Breathe out. Open your eyes, knowing your true worth withopen eyes.You have swept away your fears, doubts, and worries. You have seenyour true worth. Now you must prove your worth to yourself and to othersby transforming “mind energy into accomplishment and wealth.”10 Only inpersevering with, and experiencing strongly, the dream images that havestruck you can they materialize. The choice of images to pursue is not alogical calculation, but an emotional knowing. You may find that yourimages speak of an outcome against all odds: Trust that they are what youmust pursue. This work of perseverance is called kavanah, intention. Yourperseverance and dedication to your dream images, your burning desire tosee them come to fruition in the objective world, are what will make thoseimages manifest. Youmay be floating those images in your subconsciousfor years, waiting for the right time to bring them to fruition. Your imagesare like seeds in the ground. With the right amount of water, the rightamount of sunshine and trust, they will grow and blossom.Exercise 40Bull’s-EyeClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine that you are in a large field. Across the field is alarge target, black on white. The center is a large black dot.Breathe out. Know and see perfectly what it is that youwant to accomplish. Know that the goal is the bull’s-eye.Breathe out. You are holding a bow and arrow. A masterarcher is your guide as you prepare to release your arrow.Breathe out. Close your dream eyes, and see your arrowflying straight into the bull’s-eye.Breathe out. Open your eyes, and shoot, knowing youcannot fail.Breathe out. See your arrow shooting straight into thebull’s-eye.Breathe out. Open your eyes.There are many loops and distractions away from the main path. If youhave lost sight of your goal, don’t waste time on regrets or guilt; they are anindulgence you can’t afford.Exercise 41Goodbye, Regrets and GuiltClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.You are standing in your meadow. Look up at the sun.Breathe out. Stretch up your hands and arms. Sense andsee your arms become longer and longer and your hands turnto light.Breathe out. Put your hands of light into your body, andtake out all regrets and guilt.Breathe out. Lift your hands, filled with regrets and guilt, upto the sky; see your arms elongate; and soon see your handsdisappear into the blue sky.Breathe out. When you no longer feel the weight of yourregrets and guilt in your hands, bring them down.Breathe out. Look at your empty hands; what are youfeeling? Breathe in the blue light from the sky; see it filling thevacated spaces easily.Breathe out. Open your eyes.Since you live in time, setting a schedule is essential to the realization ofyour goal. Schedules might have to depend on outside circumstances, butthe most successful deadlines are those that are set by your dreaming.Exercise 42DeadlineClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Visualize your goal. Knowing that “a goal is a dream with adeadline”11 catch a ray of light and draw a circle of light in theupper right-hand corner of the sky.Breathe out. Catch another ray of light, and see itbecoming a golden pen.Breathe out. Write in gold letters above the circle: date atwhich my goal will manifest. Specify your goal.Breathe out. Look into the circle, and see the date appear.Ask for day, month, year. Trust your own eyes.Breathe out. Open your eyes, seeing the date with openeyes.Write the date on a piece of paper, and pin it up where you can see it everyday. Keep walking toward your goal. Stay focused, one-pointed. Followyour burning desire. Let nothing distract you.Exercise 43Little DevilsClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Walk toward the bull’s-eye, seeing your arrow firmlyplanted in its center.Breathe out. As you cross the field, on either side of you isa little devil trying to distract you from reaching your goal.Breathe out. What is happening? How do you get to yourgoal? Do you get to your goal?Breathe out. Open your eyes.The Talmud tells us that “nothing is made known in this world but whatis made known in advance by means of a dream or a proclamation.”12 Yoursubconscious knows. It exists in a Now comprising the past, the present,and the future. How is that possible? Imagine an ocean without boundariescalled the imagination. Aquatic forms or sequences of forms pop up anddisappear. Below the surface is the kernel of all-knowing called your soul.It knows and reveals to you, through the pop-ups that appear at the surfaceof the ocean, all your potentialities. It knows, to give you an example, howmany children you are destined to have. You are free to choose to surrenderto your knowing, or to turn away. If you refuse to have the number ofchildren your soul has signed up for, it is your prerogative, but it may be toyour detriment. You will be taking a diverting path away from the truth, andyour birthing pains will be that much greater. You are free to choose yourknowing or to refuse it.You cannot manifest what your imagination hasn’t already seen. You cannotpaint like Gauguin, because your dreaming doesn’t see like him. You won’tbe a millionaire if your soul has decided otherwise. The self-help book TheSecret by Rhonda Byrne has sold you a lie. Outside forces may make youthink you want to be a millionaire, and you can visualize, for instance, acheck written to you for a million dollars. But you cannot manifest it if yourdreaming hasn’t made it known to you beforehand; it is impossible. It’s as ifyou decided to be a football player, but your body is puny and undersized.Your dreaming is your energy form. Your body is the manifestation of thatenergy form. Why you would be puny, and not made to be a millionaire, isthe secret of genetics, your ancestral history, and your soul. There is muchmore to be said about that, but we will discuss it in chapter 9 when we talkabout ancestry.You can be sure of one thing: What your dreaming has shown you, youcan be or do. You can and will manifest your dreaming so long as yousurrender to it, put all your emotional energy behind your images, and donot block the flow of your imagination. We’ll discuss blockages in the nextchapter.Kabbalah says that each one of us is born with a mission. Think of yourmission as your angel. The angel never gets distracted. It has only one leg,and it flies like an arrow to its goal. Which means once you’ve found yourangel, don’t let yourself get distracted. By accomplishing your mission, youare helping the tikun olam, the repair of the world. To give you a personalexample, when I was twenty-nine, I had a vision: I saw a school fordreamers. I could see the buildings and the departments. Like the academiesof the bnei ha-nevi’im, the schools of the Sons of the Prophets thatflourished in biblical times, my school was about teaching dreaming and itspowerful uses to modern communities. I saw a number of differentdepartments dedicated to using dreaming for healing, for trauma, formothers-to-be, for companies, for coaching actors, for prayer and spiritualdevelopment. Forty years later the school I dreamed of exists in theobjective world. I called it The School of Images® (SOI). Located in NYC,it has branches in the Americas, Asia, Australia, Europe, and Russia, and ithas specialized departments, just as my vision had shown me. Writingbooks was also part of my vision, and as you can see, that’s what I’m doingwhenever my teaching schedule allows. So the dreams come true. I usethose words to emphasize again that dreaming, far from being unreal, is themost powerful reality advocate you have.Wandering through Berakhot a and b, the folio of the Talmud dedicated tothe art of dreaming, one comes across this strange statement: “Three typesof dreams are destined to be fulfilled. These are: a dream one sees in themorning, just before he wakes up; a dream that his friend dreamt about him;and a dream that is interpreted within a dream. And some say: a dream thatwas repeated is likewise destined to be fulfilled.” What do these types ofdreams all have in common? The dreamtime seems insistent on saying onething: Pay attention! It does so by different means: by forcing us toremember—by bringing the dream close to waking consciousness; givingus goose bumps when another dreamer tells us what we haven’t been ableto hear; jolting us, by revealing the meaning of the dream within thedreamtime;and repeating the same message, in case we didn’t get it. Arepetitive dream can be good or bad. You can be stuck in a blocked patternor like Joseph, who had two similar dreams*78 “. . . his brothers werejealous of him, but his father kept the matter in mind.”13 Keep the matter inmind, either to rectify the dream if it is portentous, or to make it manifest ifit is fortuitous. You have four ways of making a fortuitous dream manifest:Bringing what the dream wants into clear consciousness;Listening, not resisting or blocking what resonates as truth when othersdream about you, or open your dreams;Opening your own dreams;Rehearsing the good images in your mind.If you wish to make manifest your goal, you must do the work that Godstepped away from. Now it’s your turn. But making, la’asot, doesn’tnecessarily require effort. The sweat of your brow may be required in theobjective world to finish the work of making, and to concretely bring brickand mortar together. But in Genesis, mention of making appears beforematter. Making is about making it come true. That means, for you, returninginto the dreaming. You can’t believe that simply holding an image of yourgoal in mind can bring about the desired outcome? You can’t believe thatwe can manifest from mental energy something concrete in the objectiveworld? Breathe out and pause. It all happens in the pause, the rest on theseventh day, the moment of letting go and letting the image fly to itsdestination. Sai Baba, the Indian guru, comes to mind as being known tomaterialize vibhuti (sacred ash) out of thin air. While some accused him ofsleight of hand, it was never proven. Was he a magician? Or was he trulyable to materialize vibhuti as well as fruit, candy, flowers, and evenjewelry? If so, he appears to be an exception, for like Adam he was able totransform energy into matter instantaneously.Yet you too participate in “the transformation of things,” as ZhuangZhou, the Chinese sage, put it, pretty much instantly. You give a dollar andget a coffee. You make a phone call and acquire a new client. Reality’sboundaries with the dream world are porous, and “the transformation ofthings” can happen fast. Manifesting a table may mean that you follow theinner movement, the still small voice of the inside, as I did one morning inSoHo, followed by my infuriated husband. Being an Aries, fiery, he wasready, he declared, to divorce me if we didn’t get a dining room table today.“Where are you going?” I didn’t know, but I was going to have a coffee,and then . . . I was going down this street, and then . . . I was going into thisthrift shop, and then . . . I was going up the stairs with my husband pullingat my coattails. At the top of the stairs, pushed into a corner, amidst piles ofold clothing, was a magnificent art deco table, priced ridiculously low. Myhusband signed the check, eyebrows raised, in silence. The truth is I didn’twant to be divorced, so I had a burning desire and a pointed question. Also Ilove art deco. Magical thinking? No, simply the power of dreaming tomagnetize what you are looking for. After writing this paragraph last night,I left my desk to go to a Broadway show. At the ticket booth, the clerkcouldn’t find our tickets. The show was fully booked. I could have emoted,made a dreadful scene, and left disappointed. Instead, “I imagine us seatedin the orchestra,” and breathe out. Pause. At that moment, a man rushed tothe counter: “My wife is sick; can I return these tickets?” Here wasinstantaneous manifestation, in case I was ever in doubt.How does one define what just happened? The word that comes to mindis synchronicity. As defined by the Oxford Dictionary, synchronicity is “thesimultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related buthave no discernible causal connection.” This doesn’t explain anything,unless you have a quantum mind. “No discernible causal connection” butforms and timing fitting into each other perfectly is exactly how dreamingoccurs. I’m sure you too have experienced in your life synchronous eventsthat astonished you and that you couldn’t explain logically, but they madeyou happy! What if you were to be proactive, to make this happen? Returnto your dreaming, visualize your goal, and hold your image calmly andhappily in mind. The key is to have calmed your emotions by switching tofeeling. Don’t panic or get angry (that’s emotions); just visualize your endgoal and feel happy (that’s a feeling) as you hold it present in your mind.Trust the power of your imagination to form the outer world. Then “let goand let God!” And you will see your inner images magnetize an outerreality that fits perfectly, like a piece in a puzzle. Remember when thishappens to make a note in your DreamBook, in the box calledverification.*79Here is an exercise to help you surrender to your dreaming. Have asimple goal in mind. You’re looking for the perfect gift for a friend but haveno idea what to give her, or where to find it. Her birthday is tomorrow, andit’s a big one, so you have an urgent need to find just the right thing. Thisexercise is best done in a city.Exercise 44The WalkDecide to take a walk, keeping your goal in the back of yourmind.There is no fixed itinerary.When you come to a crossing, if the lights are green forpedestrians, cross.If not, turn and cross in the other direction.Continue walking, letting the lights dictate where you aregoing.If something attracts you as you walk down the streets,stop and look. Go into shops.Anything that attracts you, go for it.But remain relaxed and easy. There is no effort here, onlyplay.Continue your walk until you have found the perfect gift, orcontinue walking for half an hour.Don’t forget to write in your DreamBook what happened. If nothinghappened, at the very least, it’s a fun way to spend half an hour, and bytaking a different route from your usual, you will feel refreshed by the newsights. If you haven’t found what you were looking for, something else mayhave caught your attention. Learning to get two worlds to fit together likemirror images takes a little practice. Repeat the exercise whenever you can.You might not get any results for a while, until suddenly synchronicityhappens for you, not necessarily on the walk, but at a theater booth.The playful, happy attitude is key. What helps to enhance yourhappiness is light. You need the light of the sun to grow strong and healthy;you need it to become powerful. The sun’s energy is like gas in your tank.You can use it well or for dire purposes. As you know, with manifestation,there can be no in-between states: You are either a pessimist manifesting asad world or an optimist manifesting a glad world. Either way you will bemanifesting. What helps to orient manifestation is your solar plexus, the sunin your body. This is a great network or ring of nerves, concentrated belowthe rib cage, in the pit of the stomach. While you cannot control thevagaries of the weather that determine how much sun you’ll get, you cancontrol your solar plexus. Your personal sun shines or hides itself,depending not on clouds, but on your emotions. Observe your solar plexusnow. Is it contracted or expanded? Some people have a chronicallycontracted solar plexus. The solar plexus closes up when you’re frightenedor shines out when you’re happy. While you may not have consciouslynoticed it in others, you can be sure that those who are successful have aradiant solar plexus.In a bad situation, your solar plexus can either be so tight it lets no lightout or so open it leaks out all its energy. A great shock, like an accident orterrible news, will jolt your solar plexus wide open. Many people havedescribed this phenomenon where the DreamBody escapes and floats up outof the physical body. This is a natural survival mechanism. The first thing todo for people in shock is to close the solar plexus: Put your hands, a pillow,or a folded coat over thesolar plexus. This will bring the person in shockback into his or her body. People who stay too long out of body can get sickor even die. If your solar plexus is chronically tight, that too can make yousick and incapable of manifesting properly: Push it open by expanding yourstomach. This must be done again and again until the body loses its badhabit of constricting. You will know it is done when you have no more painin the solar plexus. The solar plexus opens and closes rhythmically. But itwill contract arrhythmically as soon as you are in danger; apprehensiveabout an important interview, an exam you are about to take, speaking inpublic, or impressing new clients; or experiencing a host of other publictests you must face. To use your solar plexus to manifest, to shine lightupon those you wish to impress favorably, or to attract to you the clientsyou need, here is the exercise to do.Exercise 45The Solar Plexus (Formal)Close your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine that you’re standing in your meadow. Look up atthe blue sky, and see where the sun is. If the sun is to yourleft, watch as the sun travels across the sky until it reachesnoontime and the sun is right above you.Breathe out. Elongate your arms toward the sun. Feel yourhands getting warm, turning to light.Breathe out. Catch the sun in your two hands, and bring itdown. Put it in your solar plexus. See it igniting the sun inyour body, then quickly put the sun back in the sky.Breathe out. See the sun ignited in your solar plexus,radiating out in all directions. See it as a great wheel of light.See how others are attracted to your light and warmth andstart walking toward you from all directions.Breathe out. Open your eyes.Practice this three times, the day before a stressful experience, then earlynext morning. If the stressful experience happens in the evening, do it twomore times that day. Make sure that the third time is just before the stressfulevent is scheduled to happen. As you go into the interview or onstage,throw the light on your audience. To manifest clients, do the exerciseformally, every day in the morning for twenty-one days starting from thenew moon, or from one period to the next.Imagery is the language of the inside. Images drive your health or illness.Images drive your feelings or emotions. Images drive your freedom orblocked belief systems. Once you understand the power of your images tomake or break you, you will be able to change your life for the good. Youwill be able to manifest what you dream. Your dreaming is as concrete asthe chair I sit in. Use it well. It is your power of embodiment andmanifestation.W8Dreamfields and ComplexesAnd the living creatures ran to and fro like flashes oflightning.EZEKIEL 1:14hat are you made of? Are you flesh and only that? Or are you onlyenergy? The Kabbalah says: “Every moment we are being emanated,willed into existence across the simultaneous stages of unfoldingknown as the Four Worlds.”1 The universe is unfolding simultaneously infour levels: inception, creation, form, manifestation. Think of it as fourtransparent diagrams, one above the other. This means that we are, at everymoment, simultaneously experiencing within ourselves the bursting-forthspirit of the big bang (conception), the fiery energy of the unfolding(embryo, fetus), the boundary forming “until here shall you go and nofurther,”2 and the fascia and skin wrapping of the finished product,manifesting a formed human being. We are all at once spiriting-energizing-forming-fleshing and constantly in the process of exchanging informationbetween these four worlds within us. We move incessantly between energyand flesh, vitality and death, movement and pause. Yet our belief systemfixes us squarely at the level of manifestation, and we ignore, at our peril,the other three realities that inhabit us. If we could access them, could theseother three levels help us to deal with manifestation, or to heal problems weexperience in our flesh? Many modern thinkers stay caught in the hamor,the material level the sages call the donkey level,*80 believing in all itsphysical limitations, pains and slow deterioration. For most of us breakingaway from the belief in pain to experience other realities is nearlyimpossible. Our flesh hurts, our emotions confound, our thoughts tormentus, and we cannot rise to spirit, for the heavy blanket of clouds that obscureit.We have discussed how to climb the ladder of dreaming that takes usfrom the nightmare/repetitive/busy manifestations of our daily lives to lightand to sublime oneness. But now we must deepen our understanding. Whilethe work may appear linear—all we need to do is go up the ladder ofdreams—it is certainly not just vertical. It does not consist of floating out ofour bodies into an etheric alternate reality while ignoring the fire and furyof everyday existence. We are not meant to detach ourselves from thenightmare/repetitive/busy manifestations of our daily lives, but instead toheal them. In fact, these knots or nodules of blocked energy are the obstaclecourse we must learn to confront. Without an obstacle to pit ourselvesagainst, there is no reason for us to grow. As God says in Genesis: “It is notgood for man to be alone. I will make him a helper k’negdo, against him.”3Most of our blocks and repetitive patterns appear in relationship to anotheror to the world. Why do these blocks, patterns, and pains recur again andagain, to the point where we are sick of them? As we know, “habit isstronger than reason.” For most of us, only when we are driven tounbearable pain do we finally decide to tackle our bad habits. Maybe that isour inner cue: the scale tips, and we either die or learn a new behavior.Reality has different facets, layers, and directions. We must run and return,run and return, again and again, between light and hamor (matter), like theliving creatures of Ezekiel’s vision, exploring the many directions andlayers of our dreamfields. Since our dreamfields are fourdimensional, andmaybe even five-dimensional, we must learn to navigate their complexity.If stuck energy blocks our way, it is the occasion to clear it by using anykind of transforming action that might work, such as imaginally plungingin, encircling, climbing above, sweeping to the left, destroying, melting, orburning the obstacle. Our life is about clearing what blocks our exploration.Those blocks are the impulse for us to weave an ever-larger network ofexperiences that flows and stretches out in the six directions of space andtime. By consciously facing and dissolving our blockages, we enlarge ourexperiences, and turn our DreamField into pure consciousness.Our DreamField is the basis of our existence. We emerge out of thatDreamField, not the other way around. Our DreamField is the constantlychanging, ever creating network on which our bodies, as we know them,shape themselves and manifest. That we believe in the fixed manifestation,instead of concentrating on the ever-evolving creation that we are, is wherewe get caught. We are not made of flesh, but of a matrix of movingimagery. Movement is the signature quality of our incarnation, starting withthe first cell that unfolds into two, then four, then eight cells, then thousandsclustering around a fluid-filled vacuum called a blastocyst. Mysteriously,the fluid-filled vacuum contains the blueprint or DNA patterning (theimage) from which all our unfolding originates. Yet instead of reveling inthe unfolding, we try to fix our manifestation into an idealized form. Westrive to hold our form back from its inevitable auto-destruction. In theprocess, we block the wild adventure that can send us exploring forwardand backward in time, left and right in space, up into spirit and down intomatter, pushing our frontiers beyond our wildest imaginings and enjoyingdiscoveries we neverdreamed of. By engaging the wild adventure, we willfind that we are also strengthening and solidifying the central point of lightthat is our root or soul.What is a DreamField but the great matrix called Garden of Eden, theendlessly creative unfolding power? When “HaShem God took Adam andplaced him in the Garden of Eden, to work it and to guard it,”4 the Gardenand Adam were one, encompassing the whole universe. As a descendant ofAdam, you inherit the Garden to work it and to guard it. But have you reallyworked it or guarded it? How large is your garden, how vast yourDreamField? The answer is that it is not as vast as Adam haRishon’s, thefirst male/female but it is as vast as your consciousness can grasp. Can youmake it larger? Can you strengthen its creative muscle? What blocks it fromspreading, like a great golden web to the outer edges of the universe?The word “Eden” in Hebrew means delight. When we feel delight, likeAdam haRishon, we are infinitely expanded. Delight for a moment returnsus to being who we really are, the Adam of the Garden working it andguarding it. Delight clothes us in infinite radiance that spreads and expands,washing away all ills, blocks, and habits. “Happy is the share of one whoattains this garment of which we have spoken, in which the righteous areclothed in the Garden of Eden!” says the Zohar.5But when Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden, theirDreamField contracts. They lose their radiance, as they separate fromDivine source, and feel their nakedness for the first time. Theirexpansiveness is reduced to animal skins God gives them to coverthemselves. The serpent, royally erect, loses its legs and is condemned tocrawl on its belly. Fear and shame constrict their DreamField, and theconsequences are what we all suffer: enmity, pain, effort, and illness. Weare all today fallen Adams and Eves, but we are also potentially radiantAdams and Eves, it is our choice. However, instead of seeking to repair ourDreamField, we more often blame the consequences on God and rebel bybuilding our own towers of Babel.6 Giving birth, the creative sign of ahealthy DreamField, became even more difficult.A woman making bricks was not allowed to be released in thehour of childbirth, but brought forth while she was makingbricks.7The midrash imagines the baby falling into the clay and becomingencased in a brick, the mother’s creativity smothered and fixated.8 Insteadof the unquenchable creative flow embodied in Eve-Havah’s name, motherof all living, here the mother’s heart becomes heavier and heavier as shecontinues her task of turning fluidity into hardness.What are the first signs of a DreamField problem? A blockage of energy,illustrated by repetitive gestures, repetitive dreams, and mental blocks. Wegenerally call these repetitive behaviors bad habits, but in modernpsychological terms they are called symptoms. Symptoms appear in all fourbodies, physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual,*81 examples of whichabound. You will easily recognize physical or emotional symptoms. Mentalsymptoms are harder to see, as we don’t question our fixed ideas. Imentioned in the preface that I had inherited my mother’s attitude towardeverything Jewish. I wasn’t actively anti-Semitic, I just was an anti-Semite.I had never questioned that intellectual position. It would require a k’negdo(confronted with an obstacle) event for me to realize I had a blockage. If thedefinition of health is being fluid and open, then I definitely wasn’t healthy.As for spirit, our fourth body, the greatest blockage is accidie, another wordfor apathy and indifference toward the mystery, or hubris, excessive self-confidence and pride.Take a moment to observe repetitive patterns in your life.Exercise 46Repetitive MovementsClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Into a mirror ask to be shown a pattern that repeats in oneof your four bodies. What image are you shown? What bodyis affected?Breathe out. Ask yourself what you need to do to respondto the necessity of your image. And do it until resolution of theimage. What are you feeling?Breathe out. Open your eyes, seeing the new image withopen eyes.While we can identify the level at which the symptom manifests, all fourbodies are involved, because in the final analysis they are one. To give youan example, here is the story of an older man who was plagued by feelingsof inferiority. “My mother had eight pugs and she loved them better thanshe loved me!” While he had reached the peak of his profession, for whichhe was much envied, he couldn’t enjoy the fruits of his success. His originalwounding was emotional, but his mental and spirit bodies were deeplyaffected, and he died of prostate cancer, quite a metaphor for a blockedcreative flow. Carl Jung calls this “core pattern of emotions, memories,perceptions and wishes” a complex. The man had an inferiority complex.Exercise 47Symptom ClearingClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Look at a habitual symptom. What part of your physicalbody is involved?Breathe out. What emotion is involved? See and feel themovement of this emotion in your physical body.Breathe out. What is your fixed idea about this? Breatheout. What memory is attached to this symptom?Breathe out. Return to before you experienced thissymptom.What do you experience and discover?Breathe out. See, feel, and know how to repair and restoreyour four bodies to their original truth.Breathe out. Open your eyes.In this exercise we returned to a time before the symptom came intoexistence. Feeling oneself free of the memory and symptom associated maybe enough to relieve you of their presence.Why do we have memories imprinted in particular parts of our bodies?Memory starts with sensory information: It smells, tastes, sounds like . . . Ifit is accompanied by an emotion such as, anger, fear, disgust, or horror, thesensory impact is exacerbated. Emotions have specific constrictivepathways in our bodies. The more you indulge in an emotion, the deeperyou dig the pathway’s groove. Anger and fear are primary emotions. If theycannot express themselves, they are pulled back into the body and becomestagnant energies, blockages. Anger becomes irritation initially, but when itis more entrenched, it becomes frustration, sadness, boredom, confusion,depression, and self-hate. Fear becomes anxiety, guilt, resentment, andshame. Jealousy and envy belong to both primary emotions. All emotionsare constrictive.Exercise 48The Pathways of EmotionClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Start with a primary emotion, anger or fear. Relive yourlatest or most intense memory of experiencing that emotion.Observe the movement in your body.Breathe out. What color is your emotion?Breathe out. Sweep the emotion out of your body to theleft.Does it rise up from the lower belly all the way up to your face and arms?(Anger.) Does it constrict your solar plexus, causing you to double over?(Fear.)Exercise 49Switching from Emotions to FeelingBreathe out. Feel the exact opposite sensation. Where is it inyour body? What color is it? How does it move?Breathe out. Give it a name.Breathe out. Open your eyes.Do these two exercises together. I’ve separated them so that you can clearlysee the difference. We could have simply swept the emotion to the left andcalled it quits. But bad habits cannot simply be erased: They must bereplaced. This is what you’re doing by switching from emotion to feeling.How does the opposite sensation move? If you’ve done the switchproperly, your body expands like concentric circles in water after you’vetossed in a pebble. All feelings are expansive: love, peace, harmony,compassion, delight, creativity, joy, exultation,and awe, these concentriccircles of energy that I’m calling feeling will wash away your emotionalpathway, enlarging your DreamField and restoring you to your true creativeself.Repetitive emotions spawn repetitive bad behavior. You can try dealingwith your bad anger habit by changing your behavioral patterns. Butemotion is quick to rise and takes you unaware. By then it’s too late.Wouldn’t it be better to go right to the source? What pushes your buttonwhen repetitive emotions are triggered is a sensation, a word, an expressionthat triggers a memory. The seed of the bad habit, symptom or complex, isstill there encapsulated in a memory from which you haven’t been able todistance yourself. This memory is not in the past; it exists today, now, inyour DreamField, and it is blocking the creative “running to and fro.” Thefollowing dream illustrates this dynamic: “I’m trying to go up this villagestreet, but a great white cow is blocking the way, and I can’t get through.”The dreamer is consistently blocked by unresolved emotions toward awithholding and, in his case, incestuous mother, the great white cow.To retrieve a memory, go to the location in your body where theemotion is felt. The body is like a book, and it stores memories in yourcells. I remember once passing my hands above a young woman’s body toclear her energy field. “You are six, and you have a rabbit in your womb!”The reaction was immediate. She burst into uncontrollable sobs: “My daddykilled my rabbit when I was six!”Traumatic memory is imprinted by a shock. The therapeutic communityhas long believed that telling the story releases the sufferer. But I believe,from years of dealing with sufferers, that unless the attention is drawn awayfrom the story toward a new sensation or image, retelling the story will onlyimprint the memory deeper. EMDR*82 and tapping therapy*83 claim to usesuch shifting successfully. For my part, the most organic and powerful wayto clear traumatic memory is to correct the images in the subconscious, bygoing back to those images, smells, and physical sensations that areimprinted in the cells. The work is to transform the experience. Once thesufferer experiences the revelation of a new image, that image effectivelyreplaces the old images. How does one respond to the necessity of the whitecow? Here are some answers I’ve gotten from my students: I can climbover, dig a tunnel under, fly over, cut the cow in two. The important thing isto be able to get past the blockage and see what is beyond. What is beyondis an unobstructed view of the DreamField and its myriad possibilities,which had been blocked by the white cow.We are made of dream images, and those dream images can affect ourfour bodies. The emotional shock of the father killing this young woman’spet rabbit affected her mental and physical bodies. She developed anautoimmune disease and was no longer able to conceive. But after ourwork, she was able to think of having a baby in a whole new way. Sheadopted a beautiful little girl.Like Oedipus, whose name means “swollen ankles,” we can’t simplywalk away from our complexes. The Greeks were pessimists and believedin fate: Oedipus was fated to live and die by his complex. In psychology wecall this the Oedipal complex, the desire to kill one’s father and marry one’smother (the opposite for girls). This is a developmental childhood stage thatall of us must successfully navigate. But have we done so?Exercise 50The Four Stages of DevelopmentClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.See, feel, and have an image that encapsulates yourexperience of gestation in the womb;Breathe out. See, feel, and have an image thatencapsulates your experience of birthing;Breathe out. See, feel, and have an image thatencapsulates your experience of bonding;Breathe out. See, feel, and have an image thatencapsulates your experience of socializing.Breathe out. See how these four great moments repeatthemselves on a different octave every seven years.Breathe out. Go through each seven-year periodrecognizing the sameness and difference of these fourmoments in your life.Breathe out. Respond to the necessity of each image:gestation, birthing, bonding, socializing.Breathe out. What are you feeling now?Breathe out. Open your eyes.To transform our complexes, we have no better guide than fairy tales.Unlike the Greek myths, fairy tales end with happily ever after. Evolvedover centuries of storytelling in weaving rooms or village squares, thesecommunal dreams give us the hope and trust that dreaming can overcomebad habits, symptoms, and complexes. Do we live happily ever after?Obviously not! So what does this classical ending really mean?All fairy tales start with a poisonous seed. Like the Greek myth of theoracle that fixes Oedipus’s fate (he cannot escape killing his father andmarrying his mother), the fairy tale always begins timelessly, once upon atime, any time, all-time, or frozen in time. The king who will only marry alady more beautiful than his dead wife (Donkeyskin); the mother who wantsto keep her daughter all to herself (Rapunzel); the father who boasts that hisdaughter can spin gold (Rumpelstiltskin); the would-be parents who’llaccept any kind of a child, even one as small as a thumb, so long as theycan get a child (Tom Thumb); the grandmother who vicariously livesthrough her granddaughter by sending her the red cap of sexuality, thusputting her on the road to temptation and danger (Red Riding Hood); theseare all poisonous seeds, closed networks. How can telling stories, notfactual stories, but communal dreams like fairy tales, help to move lives outof stuck places into creative fulfillment?Are fairy tales about distraction, stepping away from our embodiment,being free for a moment from our sameness, our habits, and our blocks?That sounds like paradise. But distraction is like any drug, drink, sex, oreven food, it is a false paradise. Since we are the creative power behind ourDreamField, we cannot step away for long from our embodiment withoutloosening our ties to life. Yet many people will do anything to escape fromtheir bonds. The price they pay is not being present in their sensations andin their bodies, and therefore not being able to deal with the necessity oftheir situation. This can sometimes lead to death. We need to be firmlyrooted in our bodies in the here and now to be able to deal with thepoisonous seed we are confronted with.I’m not saying there are not many good reasons to escape: accident, trauma,unbearable pain, untenable life situation, or addiction, for example. TheDreamBody escaping its physical bonds and floating above the body is aninstantaneous natural phenomenon of survival in the face of a shockingsituation. It rushes out through the suddenly wide-open solar plexus or upthrough the top of the head. After 9/11 in New York City, people were allfloating above their bodies, like Macy’s Parade balloons, an eerie sight forthose of us who can see. But you can’t stay out of your body for too long.This is one of the problems of PTSD.*84 Like soldiers returning from warzones, New Yorkers urgently needed to get back into their bodies andbecome grounded again.Exercise 51GroundingClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine that you are floating in the sky like a balloon andcan’t find your way back to Earth.Breathe out. Imagine that you grow roots out of the solesof your feet, and send them growing down to Earth.Breathe out. See the roots entering and plantingthemselves solidly in the earth.Breathe out. Feel that your solidly planted roots are pullingyou back down to Earth.Breathe out. Feel the soles of your feet resting on theearth. Feel your weight as you stand on the earth.Breathe out. Start walking, feeling that this Earth isonly the unconsciousgives access to. The unconscious has no hypotheses; it is a cauldron ofswirling experiences. Tap into it, and up pops a dream image. Theunconscious deals only in revelation, and revelation, being an experience,is, by definition, true. If I turn a corner and am suddenly faced with ablazing sunset over the ocean, my heart moves not to the “fact” of thesunset, but to the wondrous experience. The conscious mind deals in facts,the unconscious deals in truth.To get to the truth of what you really want, you’re going to have to tapinto the unconscious. The unconscious runs the show, and this is a “fact”verified by many tests conducted by experimental psychologists andresearchers. Some researchers go so far as to say that the unconscious runs95 percent of our body functions. It is a “fact” that our carefully analyzedand agonized choices are mostly decided by the unconscious. Our creativeinnovations rise up, fully formed from the unconscious, and yet most of ushave no clue how to access this great power. Unlike the conscious mind, theunconscious cannot be worked out, analyzed, or pinned down; it can onlybe received. It will come in whatever form it chooses. Kabbalah, whichmeans “receiving,” is the science of letting the unconscious speak.To learn who you are, to discover your hidden motivations, and to speakto your body and cells, you will have to leave behind what you perceive asthe safe shores of the conscious mind. Can you trust the unconscious? Therelies the rub. Most of us don’t see its value because we confuse our visionswith fantasy. But fantasy is the contrary of “true imagination,” as WilliamBlake liked to call it. Fantasy is a product of your conscious mind seizingupon your brain’s capacity to make images and twisting them to suit itspurpose. Suppose you desperately want to believe this very handsome man(or woman) who is married to your best friend is really interested in you.You fantasize about the person’s overcoming many obstacles to come toyou, including getting rid of his or her partner. You visualize the personfinally embracing you, and now both of you are riding off into the sunset.This has nothing to do with the truth. Unfortunately, many of thevisualizations taught today trade in fantasy. You are told what to see. Whilethat may be entertaining, it is not transformative.The unconscious is the source of all creativity. How to tap into yourcreativity, dialogue with your images, and trigger transformation is thesubject of this book. There is a methodology to it that is as precise asanything science pertains to be. The Celts’ image for this work is a nakedblade lifted above dark waters by a mysterious woman called the Lady ofthe Lake. The waters, you may have guessed, are the waters of theunconscious. The sword illustrates the jolting, the sometimes cutting truthsof the images that pop up at the surface of the unconscious. If you wish toreturn to the Garden of Eden, you must face the revolving sword of theangel guarding its gates. Don’t worry, you will not be cut by the sword or,as the Greeks saw it, turned to stone by your Medusa truths. Like the heroPerseus*11 you will learn to disarm and, more saliently, to transform thoseaspects of yourself that you don’t like. But the Celts’ powerful image of asword above waters speaks to the cutting edge of truth that the unconsciouswields against you. What better way than to tackle your images head-on,and respond to their necessity to ignite the creative shift! You will becomethe warrior, hero, gallant knight, or lady of your life story.When Sigmund Freud coined the words “unconscious mind,” he may nothave realized that the concept of a vast unconscious part of ourselves,submerged like an iceberg beneath the surface of what we commonly callthe conscious mind, has existed since time immemorial. The ancients werewell aware of an unconscious realm populated by dangerous or godlikecharacters, fierce animals, hybrids of all sorts, and mind-boggling obstacles.What Freud understood as the unconscious mind was a store of memories,repressed emotions, and other mental complexes that remained trapped in ano-man’s-land and could negatively affect our everyday life and behavior.He believed that these repressed emotions and memories should be broughtto conscious awareness in order to be cured. He interchangeably used both“unconscious” and “subconscious,” until he finally settled for the word“unconscious.” Today psychologists are still debating the differencesbetween the two, but the word “subconscious” is rarely used. The preferredterm is “unconscious” for all of our “other than conscious processes.” Yet Ipropose to you that the term “subconscious,” coined by French psychologistPierre Janet (1859–1947), is more accurate. Janet believed that there was astorehouse of information below our conscious mind that could be accessedthrough focused awareness. We will see more about the subconsciousfurther on.The ancient world had many names for the realm that lies below ourawareness. They called it the other world, the world of the dead, the HappyIsles, Olympus. Heroes’ journeys involved crossing the “val” to the otherworld: Perce la vallée, pierce the valley, is the meaning of Perceval’s namein the Arthurian legends.*12 An Ivri, or Hebrew, is the one who crossesover. Shamans the world over speak of journeying out of their bodies toseek hidden knowledge and wisdom. Alchemists had a funny way ofillustrating their relationship to the unconscious: a man sitting in a vastcauldron, a fire burning under the pot. Likewise in China, the oldest book inthe world, the I Ching, has a hexagram named the cauldron. Here is whatthe hexagram says: “The image suggests the idea of nourishment. . . . Thesupreme revelation of God appears in prophets and holy men.” In otherwords, without resisting, sit in the cauldron of natural forces, and theinformation from your unconscious will rise up in you, nourishing you, andflooding you with prophecy and holiness.Do we really need to travel out of our bodies, or do we simply let theunconscious rise and submerge our conscious minds, thus giving us accessto hidden knowledge? Here is another way it is described: “And Godhovered over the p’nei tehom (the face of the abyss),”*13 and created theworld in seven days. Read p’nei tehom as God’s unconscious realm. Canwe, like God, hover over the void of the unconscious and bring forth newcreations? We do it every night when we dream. Kabbalists call thismaneuver the plunge—yeridah†14—the drop of the conscious mind into theunformed substance of the unconscious mind to elicit new formations.Since Freud, much has changed in the world of psychology. Psychologyhas gone through many incarnations, and different schools have developed.But today a new discipline has arisen in response to criticisms thatpsychology is but a soft science. Psychology has become experimental, andsocial psychologists are scientists who, among other things, set upexperiments to demonstrate the influence of the unconscious mind on theconscious mind. A great many scientific studies—many that have beenreplicated—show without a doubt that our rational mind is deeplyinfluenced by the unconscious. The new discipline is aptly called the “newunconscious.” It is based on a twotiered model of the brain. We could see it,suggests Leonard Mlodinow in his 2012 book Subliminal, as two railwaysystems with interconnected lines that crisscross and sometimes sharestations. He goes on to describe many scientific experiments that make it“abundantly clear that within this two-tiered system, it is the unconscioustier that is the more fundamental.” The unconscious responses that aretriggered in our bodies when we are threatened happen before our consciousmind gets involved. No animal species could have survived on this planetwithout those instantaneous unconscious responses to existential threats. Aswe have already mentioned,youranchor.Breathe out. Open your eyes, feeling this with open eyes.But then what if the DreamBody can’t or won’t reintegrate its physicalboundaries? What if the life situation is so untenable that floating out of thebody is the only way to survive? To live half in, and half out, is often theheroic stance adopted by children to survive difficult family situations. IsCinderella an escapee? Through playing the good girl, the martyr in the faceof unrelenting abuse from those who should love her, she is in factdisembodying herself from her true instincts. She’s playing the angel totheir devils. She looks like a flesh and blood girl, but her name, meaningcinder or ashes, tells us that she’s not in her body. Like the mourners of old,covered in sackcloth and ashes, she’s mourning herself, her true instincts,and her emotions. She has accepted the fact that to survive, she must hidewho she really is. And what better way than to dissociate? What brings herback into her body is a jolt, the proclamation of a ball, a great and possiblenew future with love attached. Hope has put her right back into her body.Now she must have a gown and shoes, and a carriage with horses andfootmen. Her instincts of pleasure and comfort and beauty are rushing backto her. She is coming alive again.But the clock strikes midnight, and the bell-like sound reawakens all herbad habits that come rushing back on cue. At midnight, Cinderella returnsto be a miserable girl again, covered in ashes and sackcloth. The habit ofdespair, doubt, and hopelessness destroys the hope exactly on time. Habitswork in rhythms and don’t appear all the time, only at certain fixed times orwhen certain triggers have been released.We were madly in love, talking marriage and children. For sixmonths, we were never out of each other’s sight. He madeplans to leave his restrictive job and lifestyle. He loved thenew horizons I was opening up for him. Then he went abroadwhere he met up with all his old cronies. I don’t know whathappened, but he returned a different man. He said he nolonger loved me and that the relationship was over. Hereturned to his narrow, restricted form of living.The midnight stroke had tolled, and for him so far there has been no joltout of his old blockage, his belief in his own inadequacies and failure.Luckily for Cinderella, her blockage, her habit of dissociating, becomes theway to her cure. When she dissociates at the stroke of midnight (which weknow was inevitable, since bad habits, which are twisted instincts, areprogrammed like breathing or sleep to a certain time pattern), she loses hershoe, her grounding. Luckily for her, the prince finds the shoe and tries tofit the shoe to its owner’s foot. The prince is the sign for her to take up thechallenge, put on her shoes, and start walking on this Earth. “I amembodied, therefore I experience that I am.”9Who is the prince? Sometimes the prince is someone the universe sendsto us as a gift, to help us overcome our bad habit. This could be a therapist,a mentor, or a friend. Sometimes the prince is someone our dreaming sendsus to help us overcome our blockage. We may need both, for there isnothing harder than to clear bad habits.We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, but the Lord brought us outwith a mighty hand.10It takes the mighty hand of the Lord to lead us out of Egypt! Egypt,Mitsrayim in Hebrew, means “the narrow land.” If the mighty hand forCinderella is the prince, no pun intended, again we ask who is the prince?Let’s conceptualize the story of Cinderella as a dream where each person inthe dream is a part of the dreamer. The father, the active dynamic part of theself, is dead. The dreamer is battling with a dependency issue, heroverwhelming desire to be loved by the mother. The mother is a bad motherto her, but good in a dynamic dreaming way, as by her opposition toCinderella’s collapsed state, she is pushing Cinderella to grow up. Thesisters are projections of her rebellious self, mirror images, opposites of thegood girl complex. Now can you see who the prince is? Her dynamic self(father, prince) is resurfacing from the dead, and is urging her to comedown to Earth, to ground herself, to stand in her own two shoes. And whatbeautiful shoes they are!Exercise 52Listening to the BodyClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Feel and sense that it is only by knowing how to hear ourbody, and how to speak to it, that we unblock its blocked partsand are present to ourselves.Breathe out. Know that it is this presence to ourselves thatlets us be present to the world, and present to others.Breathe out. Open your eyes, feeling this with open eyes.Remember that fairy tales are communal dreams. Understanding thatyou are each and every part of the dream will help you to understand themessage of the fairy tale (identifying the poisoned seed in yourDreamField), and to embody its ultimate transformation. Imagine that likethe queen in “Snow White,” you make a wish that reflects your vanityrather than your truth. “How I wish I had a daughter that had skin as whiteas snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony.” But as thedaughter grows up, and you’re confronted with her youth and beauty, thered alarm button that triggers your complex lights up. You die to your oldself, the good mother, and you become the wicked stepmother. (The Grimmbrothers called her stepmother because they were afraid that people wouldbe turned off by the idea of a bad mother.) Before the mirror, in love withyour own reflection you are in a wasteland of envy, and refusal to see thetruth, until the mirror’s voice, your inner voice, jolts you into the beginningmovements of transformation. “Snow White is more beautiful!” Who isSnow White?Exercise 53Snow WhiteClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Be the wicked stepmother, looking into the magic mirror onthe wall. Ask the mirror: Who is the fairest of us all?Breathe out. Hear the words: “Snow White is fairer.” Seeher.Breathe out. Enter the mirror and become Snow White.Pay attention to the difference in feeling between thestepmother and Snow White. Who do you prefer to be?Breathe out. Come out of the mirror, and look into it; whatdo you see now?Breathe out. Open your eyes.Looking out at you from your inner mirror is your soul. She is embodied inyour heart, which the queen tries to kill, by sending the hunter after her inthe forest, with orders to bring her heart back. The ravages of the vanitycomplex—having to be seen as the most beautiful, or die—are apparent,when the queen desires to eat the heart. Meanwhile the dreaming is at workin the hidden depths of the earth: the seven dwarfs (your trusty inner allies)are digging for the treasures (the forces for ki tov, good) hidden in thequeen’s own interior land. But the complex is so insistent that it manages totrick even the soul. Snow White takes a bite of the poisoned apple(poisoned seed) and falls into a comatose sleep. What wakes her up? Theprince, the active principle, attracted to the beauty of the soul. At thewedding of soul and active principle (choice), the queen is given red-hotshoes that burn the complex to smithereens. And from that moment on, theylived happily ever after.In other words, it is possible to get rid of a complex. And when acomplex is dissolved, it doesn’t return. For a moment, filled with happinessand delight, you can again expand throughout your DreamField. You canrun to and fro like a flash of lightning, enlarging your consciousness, andstretching your possibilities ever further. Until life forces you to face andconquer another complex, and another, as did Herakles (Hercules in Latin),who faced twelve tasks before he was freed and became a shining star in thefirmament of his own matrix, his DreamField.To berid of a complex, it is good to take on the different roles thatappear in the fairy tale, or in your own life story. See your life story and itsrepetitive patterns as a dream, in which all the protagonists are parts ofyourself. Your mother, your father, your partner, your spouse, children,boss, colleagues, are all mirror images of yourself. It is good to step intotheir shoes for a moment.*85Exercise 54Switching RolesClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.See, feel, and live beingA scullery maid and a queen;A child and a parent;A human being and an animal;A wicked witch and a good mother;A dwarf and a prince.Breathe out. What has changed for you?Breathe out. Open your eyes.Playing at different roles frees you from being stuck in the one roleassigned to you by your complex.Exercise 55Shape-ShiftingClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.See, feel, and live being a mouse, and turning into ahorse.Breathe out. Be a pumpkin, and turn into a carriage.Breathe out. Be a lizard, and turn into a footman.Breathe out. Be a scullery maid, and turn into a princess.Breathe out. At the stroke of midnight, see, feel, and livereturning to your original state. What do you feel? Whatchanges for you? What, if anything, do you decide to do?Breathe out. Open your eyes.Shape-shifting will help loosen your attachment to the role you’replaying. It will also make you aware of the motivations behind otherpeople’s role-playing. In “Hansel and Gretel,” you can better comprehendthe roles the mother plays, if you see each transformation as a role. The badmother who refuses Hansel and Gretel food is in fact the good mother,trying to wean them from her breast. But she is still ambivalent aboutletting go of her infants, and allowing them to grow, so she reverts back toher old role of nurturer. As her behavior is no longer appropriate for theirage, she is now called witch. She plies the children with milk and sweets, inthe process metaphorically eating them alive (not allowing them space togrow), until Gretel, sick of the dependency (she’s behaving like the activeprinciple here) she had been complicit in, shoves the witch into the oven.The transformation happens through burning. The complex goes up inflames, and the mother-witch becomes the good duck who helps themacross the river. She is now treating them appropriately for their agedevelopment. They are young adolescents, able to use their own aptitudesand riches as signified by the treasures they find in the witch’s house. Theylive happily ever after because none of them are holding onto their oldroles. They are accepting to change, to grow up, and to embody new roles.Having allowed yourself to shape-shift with your closest and dearest,like Gretel, it is time to attack the complex. Remember that you can clear itby sweeping to the left, dissolving, destroying, melting, burning, or anyother form of transforming action.Exercise 56BouldersClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine the obstacles in your life (symptoms, bad habits,and complexes) as large boulders in the ocean. Watch as thework of wind and water slowly dissolves the boulders, until allthat is left is a polished stone washed up by the waves.Breathe out. Pick up the stone, and hold it in the palm ofyour hand. What do you do with it?Breathe out. Open your eyes.There are, of course many imaginative ways of clearing symptoms, badhabits, and complexes. Fairy tale endings will give you ideas. You canchoose what best suits you. But remember, it is always good to haveinternal allies, as did Snow White with the seven dwarfs. You can call onyour helpers, guardian angels, animal allies, and ancestors.Exercise 57The Golden KeyClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine that you are given a golden key to liberate thelight princess and the lost princess.Breathe out. See them acting to bring out the best in you.Breathe out. Open your eyes.“O brother, I have an internal wound!” says King Shahryar in OneThousand and One Nights. Betrayed by a woman, his subconsciouscompelled him to use women, only to kill them in the morning. Better todispose of them before they had time to betray him. What cures him? Afemale voice, with a thousand and one ways of weaving the matrix into newconfigurations.Exercise 58InterweavingClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Listen to the silence of the forest. Hear all the differentsounds that are constructing this silence. Feel and know howthey are weaving together, but recognize how they are boththreatening and enlivening.Breathe out. Look at the play of shadow and light betweenthe trunks of the trees and the branches, and let yourself befilled by the visions and imagery coming from them.Breathe out. Smell the different fragrances, and taste theberries and fruits of the forest.Breathe out. Hear a female voice whispering through theforest; what is she saying?Breathe out. Open your eyes.Listen to your dreaming voice, the “still small voice”11 that seduces youback into the mystery! She is called the Empress, Eve, Scheherazade, themother of all living. If all goes well, if you have allowed yourself to be “re-enchanted”12 as Bruno Bettelheim calls it, a new vision of your DreamFieldwill have filled your wondering senses. Together you will birth a child oflight, as did Scheherazade and King Shahryar, and you will live happilyever after, at least vis-à-vis the complex that had previously enslaved you. Itwill no longer ever trouble you. That is the promise of “they lived happilyever after.”W9Ancestral PatternsEverything that does not rise into consciousness comes backas fate.CARL JUNGho are we? Where do we come from? Where do we go? Most of uswould say that we come from the void, and we’re returning to thevoid. But somehow that doesn’t quite cut it. We look like ourparents, or the maternal great-uncle, or the grandmother on our father’sside. Why do we look the way we do? In our bones, coloring, andmusculature, are we continuing our ancestors’ bodies? If our bodies arecreated by the DreamField, is it the parents’ dreamfields that somehowmerge in a big bang, a yud moment,*86 to bring forth a new creation, uniquebut also encapsulating information provided by the ancestral pool? Wecould say that following the injunction to be fruitful and multiply,1 themany entangled dreamfields of our ancestors bring the past forward in whatStanley Keleman called “the long body.” Just imagine the ancestral poolfrom which bubbles burst forth, float freely for a moment, explode, anddisappear back into the ancestral pool, only to be replaced by more bubbles.While our incarnations may be mere blips on the surface of the familyDreamField, they are crucial, since through our earthly incarnation we arefree to use the information given to either damage or correct the ancestralpool in any way we see fit. But will we be able to identify and exercise ourchoices?The DreamField is a matrix of experiencing. It catches holographicimages within its net that affect and transform every part of the net. TheDreamField acts like our proverbial hundredth monkey. According to thestory, a monkey discovers how to wash a sweet potato. Soon all the othermonkeys are washing their sweet potatoes. When a critical mass is reached(a hundred monkeys), the learned behavior jumps across space, andsuddenly on other islands, whole groups of monkeys who have neverwitnessed any of their kind washing sweet potatoes are now washing theirown sweet potatoes. While the hundredth monkey theory has beendebunked,something similar, but much faster, in fact instantaneous,happens, without apparent contact, within a family DreamField. A memberof the family, while living at the antipodes, out of contact with other familymembers, will resonate to the same blueprint as the rest of the family.Quantum dreaming? Across space there are many examples of peoplepicking up on the death of one of their family members, or on a traumaticfamily event. Think of radio waves. You turn on the radio and tune it toyour favorite channel, and immediately across huge swaths of land, you canhear as if you were there. It is your emotional or mental predilections thatdetermine the channel you listen to, and in the dreamtime, it is the same.Subconscious cues, perhaps programmed into the blood that you share withother family members, attune you to hidden family patterns. We could callthis telepathy, as the messages travel through space. Do those messages alsotravel forward and backward through time?I sat with my teacher Colette on a beautiful fall day. I’d traveled from NewYork to Jerusalem to be with her two days prior. Some sudden urge hadprovoked my visit. The Second Intifada*87 was raging, and my son didn’twant me to go. But I knew I had to go. If I was going, he decided he wouldgo too. “She is my grandmother!” he insisted. Her simple message to methat morning was reminiscent of my son’s proclamation: “Don’t forget yourancestors!” I wondered whether she was referring to my birth family or tohers. The portrait of a great-grandmother from centuries ago hung aboveColette’s bed. As always, her dark, mysterious eyes followed me around theroom. A great-grandfather stood beneath an image of the Shekhinah*88 andsurveyed us with severity, his long white beard shining above the darknessof his djellaba.†89 Suddenly Colette pointed her finger at me and shouted:“Go!” I was shocked and ran out of her house in great confusion. That iswhen she chose to die. I didn’t know it yet, but in that instant, she hadbecome my ancestor.Ancestors are in our dreamfields. Their ways and secrets become ours.When I got home, still in a trance from her passing, I pulled out a bookfrom my library, opened it, and read. I cannot reproduce the exact text, asI’ve never been able to find it again. It said: When the master says “Go!” tothe disciple, it means ‘Take up the torch. Now is your time. Go and teach!’The family message was passing through time, and my work was tofacilitate its continuation. I could damage the work, pass it on as it wasgiven me, or “ameliorate” it, as we are meant to ameliorate the dream.‡90 Inthe first years after her death, I would look down at my hands and see hers.Her goodness was with me; so were her few flaws. Would I be able to honorher by freeing myself, by becoming me, not her? Would I be able toembody the work and make it my own, with my own goodness and my ownflaws? What parts of her would I keep? What parts would I reject ordiscard? Did I have a choice?After the Flood, when God destroyed all of humanity except Noah andhis family and a male/female pair of each of the animal species, Noahplanted a vine in the new world and got drunk. As he lay naked in his tent,his son Ham (the name means “hot”) entered the tent, saw his father’snakedness, and did him damage.§91 Ham later reported the matter derisivelyto his two brothers who, justifiably disgusted at his lack of respect, enteredthe tent backward and covered their father’s nakedness. Noah, onawakening, realized what had happened, and he cursed not Ham, but Ham’sfourth son, Canaan! The reasoning, commentators tell us, is that, because ofthe damage done to him, Noah would no longer be able to father a fourthson. But four also means, in dream language, something stable, somethingfixed. “A slave of slaves shall he be.”2 The implication was that Canaan andhis descendants would be slaves to the raw, uncontrolled sexuality exhibitedby their progenitor Ham, that sexuality unbridled would be their cursedpattern and complex. “For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting thesins of the fathers upon the children onto the third and fourth generation.”3Does God really visit the sins of the fathers on their sons? Is this true? Is itfair?Bodies are open books for those of you who know how to read their shapes.They are also open books if you practice dreaming. Through turning youreyes inward, you plunge into the experiential memory imprinted into yourbody cells. You see the inner shape of these experiences, which combinesboth the event and your response to it. Generally it is the intensity of anevent that seeds a memory. Delight and happiness or horror and pain createevents that vibrate at a very high speed in the body. It is a rare image thatsurfaces without some form of emotional potency. This is fine if theexperience resolves, and the body returns to harmony at the same or at ahigher rhythm. If it doesn’t, the rhythmic harmony of the ecosystem beginsto degrade.I was on a kibbutz in the Negev during the Yom Kippur War. Weweren’t too far from the border, and we could hear the cannon roaring in thedesert. My neighbor went off to war, as did most of the men, and hereturned on a furlough three weeks later. He hadn’t taken his boots off thewhole time. I cut them off his feet. Being in the front line commandos, hehad horror stories to tell, but he was very calm. That night he had a dream.I am standing knee-high in a muddy swamp. Suddenly amonstrous form rises out of the mud and towers over me. Icatch a bamboo reed and plunge it into the creature’s eye. Itcollapses and disappears into the swamp.As you can see, this man was healthy. Faced with a Goliath, he acted as ayoung David did; he responded to the necessity of the image. We cansurmise that his energy body returned to harmony, but at a higher octavethan before. I hadn’t met Colette yet, but I knew what it meant. His imagesshowed him tending toward integration. I knew he was safe from what wetoday would call PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. Remember, unlessyou are prepared to tackle your images, shock of their immediacy canhasten fragmentation. This man found in himself the courage to deal withhis horror images. Transforming fear into courage, emotion into feeling,will propel us up the ladder of vibrations toward the light. He went back tothe Sinai in a new pair of boots, clear-eyed and confident and, I am glad tosay, returned unscathed. A corrected DreamField, we will see, can keep ourfour bodies safe, even in the midst of chaos and war.What if this were you and you hadn’t faced your fear, turning it intocourage? That failure then becomes an intense negative memory. Guilt,shame, and self-hate are the three devils that torment you and act as barriersin the creative flow of your DreamField. If you don’t do something about it,the fragmentation, the lack of reintegration into the dream flow, becomes apoisoned seed, existing timelessly, once upon a time, any time, all time, orfrozen in time. The devils take on forms and colors that are disturbing anddark and populate your DreamField.Everything that does not rise into consciousness comes back asdestiny.4*92The better translation for this word might be “fate” (we will reserve theword “destiny” for the future you choose for yourself). You are fated toperpetuate the guilt, shame, or self-hate; fated to be blinded to the pattern,like Oedipus’s family was: King Laius giving orders to kill the baby sonwho might one day supplant him, Oedipus killing the father who hadrejected him and marrying his mother, his sons killing each other in a vaineffort to get his throne. While the story line says that Oedipus blindshimself when he finds out he married his mother, the pattern level showsthat he and all his family line were always blind to these subconsciousurges, and their fates were sealed. “Once upon a time” does not transforminto “happily ever after.” Instead, endless strife, jealousrage, and vengefuldestruction, in the form of the three Erinyes or Furies, pursue Oedipus andhis family. His sons and his daughter Antigone all die tragically. What arewe to understand here? The Greeks, like the Hebrews, are clearly saying:The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children.”5 We could surmisethat because of the holographic nature of dreamfields, the informationalorganization of every member of that family will be affected by Oedipus’scomplex. The resonance of rejection of the son by the father, murder, andincest, with its attendant devilish images, will infiltrate the dreamfields ofchildren, of children of siblings, and cousins near and far removed. Allmembers of the family will be affected by the blockage. Should we believethe Greeks and the Hebrews?In Totem and Taboo, Sigmund Freud sketched out the idea of a collectivesoul to explain how one person’s unconscious material could be transmittedto another person’s unconscious. Carl Jung, developing the idea of acollective unconscious, opened the door to many different and evolvingtheories on the subconscious dynamics of the family. But it was Frenchpsychologists, studying family lineages in depth, in what they referred to astransgenerational analysis, who really opened up the field. Morespecifically, Anne Ancelin Schutzenberger, founder of the methodpsychogenealogy, studied the families of her patients, going back fourgenerations. She then had them draw up a family tree in a diagram shecalled a genosociogram. What was she looking for? All the major events ofour ancestors’ lives: births, marriages, deaths, illnesses, accidents, scandals,separations, traumatic events, family secrets—but more importantly, anyevents or behaviors of one sort or another that repeated for generations. Sheconvincingly demonstrated that in the “long body” many patterns repeat.Exercise 59Name PatternsClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Look at your close and extended family, and search forname patterns. Does someone in your family have the samename as an uncle, aunt, or grandparent?Breathe out. What do you recognize, if anything, betweenthe ancestor or family member’s fate and the one whoreceived his or her name?Breathe out. What images or memories come up?Breathe out. Open your eyes, seeing the new image withopen eyes.Here’s an example of entangled name and fate. A man named Elan goes toIsrael to defend the new country and is killed in Hebron. Incommemoration, his sister gives her son the same name. Many years laterthe son goes to Israel, catches a bug that goes undetected, and dies of it.Interestingly, he never wanted to go to Israel, because he always said Israelwould kill him, like it did his uncle. He was right.Exercise 60Family PlacementClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Look at your placement in the family. Are you the firstchild, the second, the third, and so on?Breathe out. Are there any patterns that you can identifybetween yourself and another member of your family havingthe same placement?Breathe out. If yes, see if you can identify similar emotionalor behavioral patterns.Breathe out. Open your eyes.In Bali children are called by their placement: one, two, three, or Ketut:four. After Ketut, there are no more family names. “Why?” I asked mychauffeur. “As a method of contraception,” he told me. I wasn’t sure if hewas joking. If not, it’s pretty astute. It reveals how numbers exert a quasi-magical spell on us. Tell a child who is having a tantrum that you’ll countfrom ten to one, and that by one, he has to be in bed. Lengthen the suspenseby adding half numbers, two, three-quarters of two, one half of two, aquarter of two . . . one! By one, the child is in bed! Here’s an example ofplacement pattern: A man is the first child, but his young mother doesn’trelate to him. When the second child arrives, also a boy, the mother, by thenmore mature, falls in love with her second baby. Later in life, her first sonmarries and has a son. All goes well. But when a second son is born, thefather becomes crazed with anger and jealousy, telling his wife he doesn’twant the child, he wants her all to himself. It’s a clear case of abandonmentand sibling rivalry transposed to his wife and second son. The storycontinues with his first son, who, having internalized the father’s pattern,pursues his campaign of jealousy and rage against the younger brother, orsecond son.Exercise 61Family DatesClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Identify recurring dates in the family: births, deaths,accidents, illnesses, financial or professional successes, ordisasters.Breathe out. What memories, and what images areassociated with those dates?Breathe out. Open your eyes.As I pointed out in my book DreamBirth, conception is more likely to occuron family dates. With births, the entanglement of two family dreamfieldscombines possible dates that are recurring in both families. Let’s say amaternal grandfather is born on July 10 and a paternal sister is born July 6.These dates become entangled, so that the probability of conceiving aroundthese dates is higher. Illnesses also tend to follow dates. In a family whereall the women develop breast cancer at the same age, the probability thatthey will all die at the same age is greater. If a family member hascommitted suicide, other family members with depression are more proneto follow in their footsteps, especially on the egregious date. If the father’scompany went bankrupt when he was fifty-two, the son and his companyare vulnerable during his fifty-second year. Check dates. This is the reasonyou don’t want to schedule a surgery, a wedding, or a crucially importantmeeting on a difficult family date.What about family secrets? Do they also act as bell-like symptoms,patterns that will have their way whether you’re aware of them or not? Theproverbial skeleton in the closet and the ghost in an ancestor’s past exist inthe subconscious.Exercise 62Repairing the Ancestral GardenClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Ask your guardian angel and helpers to accompany you.Breathe out. Imagine entering the ancestral garden. Whatdoes it look like? Does it need to be tended?Breathe out. Call on an ancestor who has a grievance orunfinished business to reveal themself. Trust what thedreaming shows you. Ask how you can help.Breathe out. With the help of your guardian angel andhelpers, find a way to help your ancestor to repair what theyneed to have repaired.Breathe out. When the repair has been done, tell yourancestor they are free, and send them to where souls live inpeace and harmony.Breathe out. Now restore the garden, by weeding, pruningand gardening until the garden blooms.Breathe out. Open your eyes, seeing the restored gardenwith open eyes.However hidden they are, family secrets will resurface one day, likeflotsam. They will either be completely revealed, or else their patterns will.Here is a case documented by Anne Ancelin Schutzenberger. A man cameto see her because he found himself in an untenable situation. He loved hiswife, but he had a mistress and couldn’t understand why. Afterinvestigation, it turned out that his father had a similar extramaritalsituation, as had his grandfather. The pattern had originated with thegrandfather but continued to play out in the grandson’s life.While Ancelin Schutzenberger perfectly identified pattern formation,she did not identify what should, by this point in the book be obvious:Pattern formation is the way dream language comes together and speaks tous. In the dreaming, as we saw in chapters 1 and 2, forms, colors, numbers,and dates aggregatebecause of affinity, similarity, or complementarities.We are not dealing here with cause and effect, but with dream and affect.We are all dreamers affected by the patterns of cycles that are those also ofnature, and of the planets. Our life’s movements—call them instincts—arein rhythmic patterns. We breathe in rhythm. We eat, sleep, make love, andmove in rhythm. Our dreaming or “mythic imagery is the body speaking toitself about itself.”6 As all of nature does, the subconscious speaks inpatterns, as Remez, the second level of DreamOpening, proves.The third level, Drash, questioning, speaks to the longing of all bodies tofind internal stability,*93 ki tov, within their own personal DreamField, andwithin the larger dreamfields of family, nature, and the universe. How dowe cure repetitive damaging patterns in the family lineage? By recognizingthat they are repetitive dreams. And as with all repetitive dreams, werespond to their necessity.We will then see the old pattern dissolving, and Sod, the treasure, orfourth level of DreamOpening, will appear in restorative images that willfacilitate a revived flow in the family DreamField, and a restored harmonywithin the larger dreamfields of nature and the universe.Is it possible? Yes, and the change is instantaneous. Only you cannot doit by simply bringing the patterns to consciousness, as Jung and thepsychogenealogists seemed to suggest. The tikun, or correction of theimages, is essential. As the shape shifts in your DreamField from dark,nightmarish images to bright, healthy images, so also do your four bodiesshift back to health. To help us return to a unified field, if I might borrow aterm from modern physics, or to help us to surrender (Kabbalah means“surrender”), as mystics would call it, to our personal and family ki tov, letus first do a memory clearing exercise.Exercise 63The Cylindrical Mirror (Formal)Close your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine that you stand before a tall, cylindrical mirror.Breathe out. As the cylindrical mirror starts turning, seedifficult memories you want to be rid of escaping as smokefrom every pore, and every fold of your body.Breathe out. You don’t need to know what those memoriesare. See the smoke floating off to the left.Breathe out. Make sure to let go of the memories hiddenbetween the folds of your toes and fingers, behind your ears,and between your legs.Breathe out. Continue watching as long as the cylindricalmirror is turning. When it stops, you know you have let go ofthe memories you can let go of today.Breathe out. Look at yourself in the mirror. How do youlook now?Breathe out. Open your eyes, seeing the new image withopen eyes.At the end of the exercise, you should be seeing yourself in the mirrorlooking much perkier and brighter. This is an exercise you can continuedoing as a formal practice for twenty-one days, or between two menstrualcycles. But while clearing general memories is a good thing, particularlyentrenched patterns need more specific exercises.There are two types of memories, memory linked to emotion, andmemory linked to feeling.*94 It is the first kind of memory that createsblockage. When anger and fear, our primary emotions of fight or flight,have run their course, exhausting their raison d’être, all is well. (For anger:You killed the tiger that was ready to pounce. For fear: You ran back to yourhut and closed the door just in time.) But when they cannot or are notallowed to run their course (“Do not hit your sister” or “Boys don’t cry”),the emotions turn inward and become secondary emotions, energies blockedin holding patterns. The stronger the emotion, the deeper the holdingpattern. Because these holding patterns are difficult to endure (eitheremotionally or physically), people seek relief by resorting to what lookslike instinctual behavior—but only mimics instinct while disrupting thenatural rhythm. They eat when they aren’t hungry, which can lead to allsorts of abdominal disorders. They oversleep, or have insomnia, with all thecascade of consequences attached to a disrupted sleep pattern. They engagein sexual perversions, or movement to excess. Their fear turned to anxietycan disrupt the instinctual rhythm of breathing, resulting in abnormalbreathing patterns, asthma, desire to smoke, and need for stimulants.Secondary instinctual behaviors with all their attendant ills are part of thecomplex pattern that you may find perpetuating down through generationafter generation, creating “an intense field of many levels of energies, inconstant process,” tending in this case toward fragmentation. Once thecomplex pattern has settled in, with its disruptive rhythms and abnormalneurological pathways, it is difficult to revert back to normal pathways. Thenervous system has become habituated.Behavior management strategies won’t cut it in the long run,†95 becausethe images that govern how the body functions are embedded deep in theDreamField. Symptoms, complexes, and patterns all start with an event thatimprints itself into the DreamField. Whether we are dealing with our ownevents, or with family history, the process of correction is the same: Weneed to return to the source.Exercise 64The Family TapestryClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine that you take the whole day, starting at dawn toweave your family’s story into a tapestry.Breathe out. At nightfall take a look at your tapestry. Payattention to the parts in the tapestry that you don’t like, tocolors and stories that stand out in a disagreeable way.Breathe out. Start undoing your tapestry color by color.Take the night to do it.Breathe out. At dawn your tapestry is undone.Now breathe out twice. Start weaving a new tapestry of thefamily story, keeping what you like, and leaving what youdon’t like. You can use different colors if you wish.Breathe out. See your finished family tapestry. Are yousatisfied? Continue until you are perfectly satisfied.Breathe out. Open your eyes, seeing the new tapestry withopen eyes.Memory is not all-inclusive. Think of it, as we’ve already said, as so manypop-ups, or bubbles, in the flow of a great river. Memories frame momentsand flows, giving them boundary forms and images you can relate to.Subterranean memories and flows, of which you are not aware, also exist.By discarding unpleasant memories, you are making room for newmemories to float up to the surface of your consciousness. All those hardfeelings that plagued you about your mother are gone. Now you’reremembering only the fun times with her. Of course, the clearing work isnot so easy to do when time has eroded many of the memories blockingyour familial DreamField through multiple generations. Your only way ofcatching the tail of those memories is by observing repetitive painfulpatterns in yourself and maybe in other members of the family. Askingquestions of family members may help. But there is a faster way: askingyour subconscious. You can always verify afterward with older members ofthe family whether what has arisen for you from the ancestral DreamFieldis true.First identify the nagging pattern you’ve observed in yourself and othermembers of the family that you wish to clear. Then do this exercise. This isthe main exercise for clearing an ancestral pattern.*96Exercise 65Clearing Ancestral TraumaClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Recognize a recurring pattern in your life. Observewhether this is also a familial pattern.Breathe out. Return back through your life, noting thepattern as it occurs. Do this fast. Do not linger.Breathe out. Go to the very first time in your life that youobserve this pattern. How old are you? Where are you? Whoelse is there? What is the event?Breathe out. Cut the cord between you and the otherperson(s).Breathe out. Return into your mother’s womb. Returnbackward through the gestational development, watching tosee whether you experience the same emotions that areconsistent with this pattern. Note the gestational ages whenyou feel it most strongly.Breathe out. Go back to the time of conception. Whatfeelings do you experience?Breathe out. Go back to before incarnation. Look down atyour two parents, and ask what attracted you to them.Breathe out. Ask what is your mission in life. Make sure toclearly recognize your mission before moving on.Breathe out. Turn 180 degrees. Looking at the familialdreamfields of your father and your mother; ask which oneneeds to be addressed to clear this recurring pattern you areworking on. See the DreamField that needs to be addressedlighting up.Breathe out. Ask to be taken directly to the very first eventthat triggered this pattern, and its repetition down the familyline. This event could have happened many generations ago.Trust your dreaming, and the images you are being shown.Describe exactly what is happening, and who it is happeningto. Describe everything you are shown about the event.Breathe out three times counting from three to one. Roll backthis person’s life to show you what was happening before thistraumatic event occurred.Breathe out. Roll this person’s life forward. How has theevent impacted this person’s life? What has this person’s lifebeen like since the damaging event?Breathe out. Come to the person’s time of death. What arethis person’s feelings and thoughts at the time of passing?Breathe out three times counting from three to one. You,today, go stand next to your ancestor as they experience thetraumatic event. Tell your ancestor you are going to cut thecord that has held their soul, and all the souls of the familylineage, in bondage to this memory.Breathe out. Call on the great force of transformation thatyou can visualize as the archangel Michael. See the blue skyopening, Michael descending, dressed in his sapphire bluerobe, holding the sapphire blue sword of fire.Breathe out. Ask his permission to borrow the sword.Breathe out. Using Michael’s sword, cut the cordconnecting this ancestor to the traumatic event. See whathappens to the perpetrator(s) or to the scene.Breathe out. If the perpetrator(s) is/are still there, continuecutting invisible cords until the perpetrator(s) has/have goneor dissolved.Breathe out. Tell your ancestor that their soul is now freeand can go where souls live. Watch as the soul leaves.Breathe out three times, counting from three to one. There isa bucket of water at your feet. Plunge the tip of the sword intothe water. See the sapphire blue fire charging the water. Nowyou have firewater.Breathe out. Return the sword to archangel Michael,thanking him. Ask for his blessing.Breathe out. Feel his hand on your head. See and feel thesapphire blue fire passing through every cell in your body,clearing and cleansing it of this old pattern. The fire will stoprunning through your body when it is done.Breathe out. See your cells returning to their naturalhealthy alignment.Breathe out. Look into the eyes of the archangel and hearhis blessing.Breathe out. Watch as he returns into his heavenly abode.Breathe out three times, counting from three to one. See theline of your ancestors all the way down to your children andtheir children, cousins, nephews and nieces, and theirchildren.Breathe out. Take the firewater, and throw it down the line.Watch what happens to the lineage.Breathe out. There is one drop left in the bucket. Pick it upon the tip of your index finger, and place it on your bodywhere the body wants it.Breathe out. Open your eyes, knowing the repair is doneand the pattern cleared out for you, for all your ancestry andfor your living and future family members.How do you know if what you’ve seen is a historical fact involving oneof your ancestors? You can make inquiries, or you may never know. It’s notthat important. What is important is that those images were logged in yoursubconscious, have surfaced at your inquiry, and were transformed. It’sdone! So simple. And it will remain done unless you perversely call backyour bad habits. Habits are what you must watch for. Imagine the followingscenario: You’ve stopped smoking, and your cravings are gone; then asmoking buddy taunts you with a cigarette, and out of some perversechallenge to yourself, you take the cigarette. That’s when the old habit canreassert itself. Any temptation? The best way to get rid of habits is to sweepthem out of your subconscious and replace them with a feeling.Exercise 66The Golden BroomClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine that you have a little golden broom.Breathe out. Sweep the temptation out of your body to theleft.Breathe out. Return to the feeling of peaceful body youhad when not smoking (or drinking or eating or whatever yourbad habit is). See where the feeling is located in your body.See its color. Give it a name.Breathe out. Open your eyes, hearing the name andseeing the color with open eyes.You have cleared an ancestral pattern, and you’re basking in thenewfound freedom. But it’s not enough to rest on your laurels. Ask to beshown other ancestral patterns that block your access to greaterconsciousness. You can do it by asking your night dreams,*97 or simplyyour daytime consciousness. † 98 Ancestral patterns abound in familydreamfields, but you want to peel them off slowly, for, as the Talmud tellsus, if you peel an onion to its core at night, by morning you’re dead. Inother words, you wouldn’t want to lose your identity all at once. Peel offone layer first, then rebuild slowly, before moving on to the next layer.Take your time. Observe yourself. Ask yourself if your qualities areinherited. While the good fairy godmothers shower us with good qualities,there is also a bad fairy godmother who curses us with a bad quality or twopassed on by our ancestors. Can we choose what we want to discard, andwhat we want to keep?Exercise 67Choosing Ancestral GiftsClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.You are standing on a vast empty plain. You know you arethe last in a long line of ancestors snaking out behind you, butyou don’t turn around to look.Breathe out. Hear a rumble starting way back and growinglouder as it comes closer, and feel a ripple of movement like awave coming toward you.Breathe out. Something is put into your hand from behind.Breathe out. Look at what you have in your hand. Do youaccept the gift or reject it?Breathe out. If you don’t want the gift, then put whatever itis to your left. If you do accept the gift, put it to your right.Breathe out. Hear the rumble, and feel the ripple again.Look at what is put in your hand. Put it to your left or to yourright, as you choose.Breathe out. Hear the rumble, and the ripple one moretime. Look at what is put in your hand. Put it to your left or toyour right, as you choose.Breathe out. If you have something on your left, burn it, diga hole in the ground, and bury the ashes.Breathe out. Gather what you have chosen to keep, andwalk off to the right, holding the gift(s) given you by yourancestors (if you have chosen to discard all gifts, that’s finetoo).Breathe out. Open your eyes, seeing the gift(s) with openeyes.Ancestors are alive and well in your subconscious field. They are yourinheritance and represent a huge untapped potential for you. After pruningthe field for bad qualities, you can think of your ancestors as an advisoryboard whose many aptitudes you can employ at will, since they exist inyour personal and family dreamfields. Know that you can always ask themquestions and make use of theirknowledge and aptitudes. Ask for theirhelp, and let the subconscious speak.Exercise 68The Ancestral TreeClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.See your ancestral tree. See that the roots are strong andhealthy, and deeply rooted in your ancestral field.Breathe out. See the trunk tall and straight; the foliage isabundant and very green.Breathe out. See that cameo faces of your ancestors arehanging from the branches.Breathe out. Walk around the tree. Find the ancestor youlike the best, and ask for advice.Breathe out. Find the one who is wise and knows best.Listen to them.Breathe out. Find the one you dislike most, hear what theyhave to say that is most distasteful to you.Breathe out. Thank your ancestors for their advices.Breathe out. Open your eyes.Knowing how to correct the familial DreamField brings up a bigquestion: Am I my brother’s keeper? If anything that happens to you affectsthe familial DreamField, then anything that happens to another member ofthe family affects you. We are mirror images of each other. By correctingthe ancestral patterns, are you changing the granduncle, the grandmother,the great-grandfather? We will never know, since they are long gone. Butwe know from experience in this lifetime that we can never change another.Our only responsibility is to respond to the necessity of the obstructiveimages that appear in our DreamField. In so doing, we are changing theDreamField configuration, and therefore anyone connected to it must, ofnecessity, even if only subconsciously, sense the change and adapt. Yourgranduncle, your grandmother, your great-grandfather or simply your twice-removed cousin will have to adapt to the new shift. Thus, by changing yourDreamField patterns, you are creating the conditions that will shift thefamily DreamField. As your consciousness grows, you will realize that yoursmall shifts and corrections will affect larger dreamfields that arecommunal, national, or even universal. Our small acts of courage and lovefor our neighbors have huge implications in the larger matrix, the collectiveunconscious of the world, and the universe.Think of your heart as the physical manifestation of the yud, thepumping wonder to this extraordinary adventure of coming to life andmanifesting through your familial DreamField. The first yud, the big bangof your conception, starts your creative adventure and continues expandingtoward its own destiny, opening to its many potential avenues of expression.Where are the roots to this first yud? They go back generations to the firstman and woman. But who sets off the big bang? Who lights the first yud?Exercise 69The First CandleClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine that your life force is the flame of a candle thathas been lit from generation to generation until it has lit yourown life force.Breathe out. If you have children, see that you haveextended your flame to light their life forces.Breathe out. Go back through all the flames that lit yourancestors’ life forces to the very first flame. Who lit that firstone?Breathe out. Return through all the flames to yours; whathas changed in your life force?Breathe out. Open your eyes.This yud, this creative dot in the middle of the void, first becomes lines,then forms, then heart and body, then all your ancestors’ bodies until yourown and will continue to manifest through your body, dreaming newbodies, new forms, and new outcomes.As Blake puts it: “The Eternal Body of Man is the Imagination, GodHimself, the Divine Body . . . we are its members.”7After Colette’s death, I took a trip across the south of France, wanting tovisit the ancestral localities she had talked to me about. I visitedCarcassonne, Narbonne, and Lunel, finding no trace of the important Jewishcommunities that had flourished there in the Middle Ages. But a surpriseawaited me inside a little village bookstore. I found a book about the Jewsof the twelfth century in Provence. When I opened it, in the middle of thepage, the first word that caught my eye was my mother’s family name, duCailar! Was this the same du Cailar family? Were they Jewish? After muchresearch, and the corroboration of my cousin Jacques du Cailar, it turnedout that, “lost in the fogs of time,” as my cousin put it, the du Cailars wereJewish. Their ancestral seat, Le Cailar, was a kilometer away fromPosquières,*99 where Isaac the Blind had his yeshiva.†100 The du Cailars notonly owned the land on which the yeshiva operated, but they were Isaac theBlind’s students. After eight hundred years, my anti-Semite mother’sdaughter had returned to her ancestral practices. Was Colette’s family alliedto ours by blood? I don’t know, but the alliance forged by families dreamingtogether is clearly alive and well eight centuries later, a testament to herdying wish: “Remember your ancestors!”W10The Inner ChildFrom Duality to SingularityRabbi El’azar opened, “Lift your eyes on high and see: Whocreated these? (Isaiah 40:26) Lift your eyes on high. Towhich site? The site toward which all eyes gaze. Which isthat? Opening of the eyes.”ZOHAR 5:26 OR PETACH EINAYIhere do we come from? Why do we come into this world? And whyto the particular ancestry we seem so arbitrarily assigned to, and forwhose sins we must pay, unless we learn to clear our lineage?*101Does our incarnation depend only on the chromosomal mix of the “longbody”? What about our quirks, and unique qualities, our smiles, our funnylooks? Do they necessarily come from a grandmother or great-grandfather,or is there something unique that makes us who we are, a combination ofDNA and soul? Does our soul consciousness have a choice as to where itwill incarnate? Or does its unique energy configuration draw it irresistiblytoward another nucleus whose patterns feel familiar? Form locks into form,embryo to maternal womb, one striving against the other, k’negdo, † 102 tostimulate change and transformation. We are born with animal instincts, butof all animals on this Earth, we are the most vulnerable. We come into thisworld naked, unprotected. Our high-pitched wails—an annoyance that can’tbe ignored—are the only defense we have against the world. We are theproverbial Fool, the zero card of the tarot’s Major Arcana. Fairy tales like tocall us simpleton. In Egyptian myth, in Greek drama, in the Hebrew Bible,in Christian hagiography, this concentrated mass of energy consciousness,this firstborn child, is an intrusion to be pursued and destroyed. The threatof death hangs over the innocent.Powerful males, the gods Seth or Saturn, pharaohs of the stiff neck,Kings Laius, Herod, or simply the family tyrants attacking a newborn? Thatthey should feel threatened by an infant in arms seems ridiculous until welook on these stories as recurring dreams. Think of how many newbornvisions, inspirations, ideas we have squashed because our logical mind (ourinner tyrant) rejected them as unpractical, while, sub rosa, the subconsciousvoice continues urging us, as the song says, to come out into the moonlightand “Tiptoe through the Tulips.”*103Think of these stories as dreams in which each protagonist is a part ofyourself. Who is the powerful adult male in you, destroying yourinnocence? You will claim you’re a victim, and that may well be true. Youwere once a newborn, clean and pure, smelling of milk and sweetness.Someone purposely or inadvertently hurt you, and you lost your innocence,as we all do in the process of growing up. Your subconscious, havingendured many traumas, has hardened you against dangers, and in defense,the victim has become the tyrant. Today you are an adult, responsible forwho you are. Your victimhood (you may hate me for saying this) is achoice. Your tyranny, the one you inflict on yourself and others, is a choice.Theygo hand in hand, a dual obstacle to your freedom: You are the victim,tyrannizing your entourage with your victimhood. You are the tyrant whosehidden victimhood you try to hide, even from yourself. Do not turn awaynow, for you already have your dreaming tools to clear traumas. If youdon’t clear them, traumas will pile up with advancing age, and you willbecome a disheartened, angry bully or pitiful victim (mirror image roles).But do you really want to go from tyrannizing your environment to being aninnocent? Naivete is not an enviable quality. But what about a reclaimedinnocence, one that you strove for and chose with open eyes?Assuredly I say to you, unless you are converted, and become aslittle children, you will by no means, enter the kingdom of heaven.1Mythically these endangered children, Horus, Isaac, Moses, and, yes,Jesus of Galilee, whose real birth date is not Christmas (Sorry!), are alltraditionally born in the springtime, when nature emerges from her longwinter, and what was gestated in the darkness of the earth suddenly burstsforth. Oh, revelation! Horus is a miracle child, whose father, Osiris, was cutin fourteen parts by Seth (the god of time and linearity) and scattered to thefour corners of Egypt. His mother, Isis, found and re-membered Osiris, buthis penis was missing, having been swallowed by a fish (a metaphor forloss of the creative ebullience of the subconscious). Thoth, the god whoinvented hieroglyphs,*104 re-form-ed the penis out of gold, and Isisconceived and gave birth to a golden child, whose right eye shone like thesun and whose left eye glowed like the moon. Isaac was born of barrenparents, who at ninety and one hundred, were told by God that they wouldconceive. Isaac is the child of Sarah’s amazement, conceived from herlaughter that brought forth her menses. At her age that such a thing shouldhappen! What joy! And his name means “laughter.” Moses, whose veryexistence had been forfeited by Pharaoh, is born with a face so radiant thatthe room is filled with the light of the sun and the moon combined. Floatingon the Nile in a basket of reeds, who else but Pharaoh’s daughter (read: hismerciful side) rescues and adopts Moses, bringing him up in the very houseof the tyrant. Jesus is born in a manger and escapes to Egypt when his life,like that of all male infants born in Bethlehem, is threatened by King Herod.Does this mean that a jolt, a shock, or danger to our survival can bringabout the marriage of the two brains, the sun and the moon? This is not thefirst time we have encountered sun and moon, Emperor and Empressconjoined. The eye of consciousness inseminates the subconscious moon.She conceives, bringing forth a never before seen revelation that lights upour inner screen, metaphorically a child of light. In the Hebrew calendarShavuot,*105 the holiday when the wheat reaches its full flowering, calledPentecost in the Christian tradition, is also the day of revelation. We wait allnight for the skies to open up and to reveal . . . a child of light of our ownmaking (“On the seventh day God created the world to make.”). On this dayit is said Moses climbed Mount Horeb, the mountain of desolation (Harebmeans “to lay waste.” Hereb is the Bible’s word for “sword”). Old formsmust be destroyed to give way to the new—new laws, new stories, theTorah. Thereafter on this day, the Hebrews brought the bikkurim, the firstfruit from their orchards, to the temple. While the outer temple doesn’t existanymore, your inner temple does. On this night when you “lift your eyes onhigh and see . . .” or, turning your eyes inward, to the “site toward which alleyes gaze,” what are the unblemished first fruits, the first revelations, youbring to your inner temple? “May it be the divine will that I not leave thishouse empty.”2 The Zohar,†106 the foundational work of Jewish mysticism,calls this conception of the new, “opening of the eyes.”Does enlightenment go through a conversion back to innocence, arediscovery of the pathways to these newborn creations in yoursubconscious? Pushing away the tyrants of doubt, despair, and disillusion,you will see light emerging from dullness into a kaleidoscope of rainbowcolors, and then crystallizing into brilliant white light.How do we start the journey back to the momentous singularity of pureinnocence that is hidden within each one of us? For many people in theWestern world, Christmas is a moment set apart, a time of peace illustratedby a radiant newborn in a manger. The scene is called the adoration for areason. Wherever there is a newborn anywhere in the world, eyes areirresistibly attracted, people bend to smile and bask in its aura. Theattraction of the new, the untainted, is beguiling. I am reminded of thisamazing photograph of a father, color tattooed from neck to waist, holdinghis naked newborn in his arms, innocence in the arms of sophistication! Butsomething else is also happening in the scene of the manger. Why are allthese people there, the mother, the father, the beasts (cow or bull, donkey),the shepherds and their flock of sheep, the three wise men? And above themall shines a great luminous star. Are they a haphazard gathering of people,or are they trying to point us toward something?Is the truth simply hidden in plain sight? Such a familiar and welllovedscene, yet no one asks what it all means. Let’s go step-by-step, exploringwhy each of these figures has made it into the Christmas iconography. Likeall dreams, the nativity scene is a map pointing us in the ki tov, the gooddirection. For the dream so obviously to have all eyes turned toward thechild of light suggests a teaching: that each of these protagonists were notalways so aligned. The necessity of the dream, and of Christmas, isprecisely to realign them to the light. We can all attest to the fact that in ourown lives, our relationships need tikun, correction. Are the parents, thebeasts, the sheep, the three kings the very forces that contributed todestroying our innocence in the first place? Let us look at each of thesefigures in their negative aspects:The father and the mother, who have wittingly or unwittingly, hurt,humiliated, or betrayed us;Our inner beasts, our emotions (anger, fear, sadness, anxiety, jealousy,envy, guilt, resentment) that, untamed, have led us to behave like animals;Our sheep, our bad habits that have strayed away from the integratedmovement of the flock (instincts that no longer function for our wellbeing;we’ll call them secondary instincts), so that we no longer follow the will ofthe inner shepherd who guards our health and well-being;Our wise men, the body, the heart, and the mind (Balthazar, black asearth, is our body; Melchior, our gold, is our heart; Gaspar, who carriesmyrrh, is our mind) we have pitted against each other, neglecting one to theenhancement of the other;The star that shines above this scene is our intuition (that manifests invisions, dreams, or in a “still small voice”) that we haven’t attended to orlistened to, that alone can guide us through this chaos back home to areconquered innocence, for “unless we are converted and become as littlechildren,” we cannot bring the kingdom of heaven down into our lives, andhappiness will elude us.Let’s start this journey where it began, with our three kings, the body, theheart, and the mind. We start with Balthazar, the body, and with your fivesenses. It is through the five senses that you reconstruct the world in yourbrain. Opening of the eyes, like the term imagery, is an inclusive term thatembraces all five senses, “whether we see with our eyes or with our ears orwith any of our other senses that kick in when we are without the use ofeither,”*107 since the image has the unique ability to elicit all senses. In thestory of Isis searching for her husband, it is the five senses that tell herwhere to find him. The five senses are called little children. They areinnocents, who sense justwhat they sense; they don’t lie. But it is throughthe five senses that our hurts are registered: hurtful sights; hurtful words;hurtful smells, tastes, or touch. You can well understand that someone whohas been touched violently or inappropriately sets up a subconscious barrierthat blocks their skin from a normal interaction with the world. The sameoccurs with each of the senses. An accumulation of these hurts will separateus from our joy and innocence. Let us begin by clearing the entryways.The eyes are our greatest accumulator of traumatic images—as I can wellattest, since my eyes, after my husband died, could not bear strong light. Ittook the gentle hands of a healer on my eyes for the hurtful image—his faceat death—to resurface and be cleared. After I made peace with the image,my difficulty with strong light instantly vanished.Exercise 70Eye OpeningClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Sense and see the sphincter muscle around your left eyeopening up. See your eye as a great globe filled with waters.Breathe out. Look at the waters of the eye, and see if theyare clear. If not, breathe out. Imagine the many little channelsof water that feed the eye, pouring clear waters from theatmosphere into the globe of your eye. See the dirty watersbeing pushed out and the globe of the eye filling up with clearclean waters until the waters of the eye are completely clear.Breathe out. Now look at the other eye; see if its watersare clear. If not, breathe out. Do what you did for the othereye, seeing the waters pouring in, washing the eye clean,until the waters of the eye are completely clear.Breathe out. Sense and see the sphincter muscles closingcomfortably around the globes of your eyes.Breathe out. What is the first image you see with yourclean eyes?Breathe out. Open your eyes, seeing the new image withopen eyes.The ears accumulate many hurtful sounds and words. Here’s the case of ayoung girl who always sat at her mother’s right side at the dining roomtable. She recounts how her mother’s strident and angry voice felt like anarrow piercing her ear. She had constant pain and trouble with her left ear.Doctors couldn’t find any physical cause for her pain and dismissed herproblem as emotional. It took some cleaning and healing through exercisessuch as the following one, but finally the pain disappeared and hasn’treappeared. In her case, it was the ears that opened.Exercise 71Ear OpeningClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine that you’re lying on a beach on a sunny day.You’re listening to the waves. Feel your ears growing andbecoming very large nautilus shells.Breathe out. Step out of your physical body in yourDreamBody, and enter your left ear, holding a broom. Go intothe deepest part of the shell.Breathe out. Retrace your steps, sweeping out in aspiraling movement. Sweep out everything that is blockingyour ear.Breathe out. Go to the right ear. Do the same thing. Gointo the deepest part of the shell.Breathe out. Retrace your steps, sweeping out in aspiraling movement. Sweep out everything that is blockingyour ear.Breathe out. Reenter your body. See your ears returning totheir normal size. Listen now with your two ears; what is thefirst sound you hear?Breathe out. Open your ears, hearing that first sound withopen eyes.As you know, smells can be powerful triggers to traumatic memories. Aspecific smell will conjure up a full-blown episode from your past.Dissolving smells at their roots is the best way to go. But here is a moregeneralized exercise that will begin the clearing. Also remember that manyillnesses announce themselves with a strange smell that comes from thebody and lingers. This exercise will help. You can also practice it when youhave an upper respiratory difficulty.Exercise 72Nose OpeningClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine standing in your meadow on a clear bright day.Where is the sun? If it’s to the left, watch it as it travels acrossthe sky until it’s above you, or to your right.Breathe out. Imagine that you hold a small spiraling brush,such as one used to clean bottles. Lift it to the sun, dip it intothe sun, and quickly take it out. See it filled with light.Breathe out. Twirl it up your left nostril, then all the way outagain, clearing and dissolving the smells and the shapes ofthe molecules that are connected to those smells.Breathe out. Lift your brush to the sun, dip it into the sun toclear it and to fill it with light again.Breathe out. Bring it down to your right nostril. Twirl it upyour nostril, then all the way out again, clearing and dissolvingthe smells and the shapes of the molecules that areconnected to those smells.Breathe out. Lift your brush to the sun, dip it into the sun toclear it and to fill it with light again.Breathe out. Breathe in; what is the first smell that comesto your nostrils?Breathe out. Open your eyes, smelling that first smell.Taste is connected to smell. If you cannot smell, you won’t taste either. Theexpression, “it leaves a bad taste in the mouth” is true. Energy has a taste.Some situations and some people will actually elicit a bad taste in themouth. Do not judge the other; just recognize what it does to you, clear it,and step away from the situation, or the person.Exercise 73Tongue OpeningClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine that you open your mouth wide and your tongueunrolls like a red carpet all the way down to the ground andstretches out on the green grass.Breathe out. Take a transparent vacuum and vacuum yourtongue starting from the tip and going all the way up into yourthroat. Make sure you stay longer in those areas that needmore vacuuming.Breathe out. Roll up your tongue.Breathe out. Empty your vacuum cleaner into a hole thatyou dig in the ground to your left.Breathe out. What is the first taste on your tongue?Breathe out. Open your eyes, tasting your first taste withopen eyes.Finally, the skin is your largest sense organ, and, because of its largesurface, very receptive to all that is happening around you. I have knownpeople with intractable pain on large swaths of their skin. It is oftenconnected to a traumatic incident that affected that particular area. Here’s ageneral exercise to clear traumatic incidents imprinted on your skin, basedon an old Santeria ritual.Exercise 74Skin OpeningClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine that you have a newly laid egg. Start rolling itsystematically all over your skin. Don’t miss any part of yourskin. You can imagine your arm growing to accommodaterolling the egg over and down your back. Don’t forget thesoles of your feet, and the palms of your hands, and yourskull.Breathe out. Break the egg into a full glass of water.Breathe out. Pour the water and egg mixture into a holethat you dig in the ground to your left.Breathe out. Sense and see your skin. What does it feeland look like now? What is your first experience now of theworld around you?Breathe out. Open your eyes, sensing your first experiencewith open eyes.You can repeat these exercises on a formal basis,*108 especially if youhave a physical problem with any one of your senses. When clearing yoursensations, you are opening the pathways of light that can now all conjoinwithin you, and form the guiding star. If you pay attention, this light willguide you by speaking to you in images or sounds, smells and tastes, ordarkening or lightening of the skin. These intuitive messages, whenattended to, begin focusing your two other kings, heart and mind, towardthe innerworld.There are two children in us, the child of light we have lost sight of and thesuffering, traumatized child that still lives in us, soiled and tainted by hurts,betrayals, humiliations, and violence. This suffering child longs to bereunited with his twin, because he re-members it is his true nature to beilluminated with joy. The Sun card in the Marseilles Tarot deck shows usthe wounded child finally reaching his twin who awaits him, armoutstretched, to bring him into the temenos, the sacred space marked by alow encircling wall. The wounded one has come over troubled waters andstill boasts the tail of an imp, a leftover from his beastly days at the Devil’sfeet.*109 The receiving twin stands on “the white earth of the new world”and has three dots in a triangle on her left side, marking her “activeconsciousness.”3 Their hands crisscross to touch neck and heart; big toesmeet, indicating that the twins’ minds, hearts, and bodies are working inunison. The sun at its zenith shows them standing without shadow,showered with tongues of fire like the apostles at Pentecost, reunited at last.Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: hehas not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, andhe has saved not only his soul but his life.4But for most of us we are still “two men.” The journey is yet to begin. Thevictim child in us is still crouching in the past, his frozen form acting as atyrannical draw away from the healthy flow of imagery. We need an“opening” of the way, a coaxing of the frozen form toward the freedom ofmovement. The suffering child must be enticed back into play.Exercise 75Rescuing the Suffering ChildClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Look into yourself. Where is your suffering child? What arethey doing? What do they need?Breathe out. What do you feel, seeing your suffering child?What can you do to help your suffering child? Do they need tobe taken care of, or do they need to come away from theplace where you found them?Breathe out. Do for your suffering child what you can forthem today.Breathe out. Open your eyes.Remember that while the little child in you may still be caught in thetraumas of the past, this doesn’t mean that the past exists. While we may beliving with calcified images of the past that still have the power to exudemiasmas of despair, it is helpful to realize that they are only repetitivedreams. Their presence may appear unyielding and unchanging to you, butlet’s go back to the idea of Mount Horeb,*110 the need to destroy the fixed,the repetitive “idolatrous” forms. The work is to return them back to theirorigins, thereby to chaos, and back to the creative ebullience of thebikkurim, the first fruits of the subconscious. This means letting go of theold familiar pains, the old habit of being a victim. The simplicity of it isastounding: By dissolving the old images and trusting to the creative, youare repairing your life.Exercise 76Healing the Wounded SelfClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Look into your body. Ask where you are hurting. Go look atthe location of your hurt.Breathe out. What memories arise out of this place ofwounding? See the images. How old are you in thosememories? Who is there with you? What is happening?Breathe out. Go and stand next to the younger you, andsay to them, “From now on, I will take care of you.” Now letthat younger you express their emotions to the person orpersons who have harmed them in whatever way isappropriate for their age. Having a tantrum, hitting, andkicking are fine, as long as those old emotions come out oftheir body.Breathe out. Cut the negative cord between the youngeryou and whoever is disturbing them. Use a knife, sword,scissors, whatever works for you. Watch what happens to thedisturbing other. You can continue cutting cords and eveninvisible cords until this other has disappeared.Breathe out. Take the younger you out to a meadow, andtell them that they are free to play, pick flowers, climb trees,swim, throw pebbles, and grow up.Breathe out. Play with them, and watch as this youngeryou grows up.Breathe out. When the other you has grown to your size,embrace them. Look deep into their eyes. Hold them closeand closer until something happens.Breathe out. Open your eyes.In most cases, the two of you will merge. If you don’t, continue to love thatother you until you do. Don’t force it; just love the other one. You can dothe embracing part of the exercise every evening for a minute until themerging happens. In some traditions, this is called a soul retrieval. It is aretrieval of energies blocked in an old pattern. When the prodigal son (ordaughter) returns home, a great feast of new images bubbles up. “And ariver went out of Eden to water the garden.”Not only do sensory or emotional blocks obstruct the river of theimagination, belief systems are just as obdurate. One of the ways our beliefsystems act against our freedom and creativity is that we are very attachedto the stories we tell ourselves.Exercise 77Stories We Tell OurselvesClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Ask yourself if you believe one or all of the followingstatements:Life is unfair; you didn’t get what you deserve; you wererejected; another person got more than you did; you wereabused.Breathe out. Looking into a mirror, sense and see how thisstory you believe is reflected in your body.Breathe out. See and recognize how the world reflectsback to you the stories you project.Breathe out. Lift your index finger to the sun. Bring it down,and in the mirror, correct on your body what needs to becorrected. What are you feeling now? How has the storychanged?Breathe out. Open your eyes, seeing your corrected bodywith open eyes.There is a difference between complaining and accepting. Try saying thefollowing, with no drama, no embellishment attached. State the fact simply:I was not loved; I was rejected; I was compared unfavorably with mysibling; I was abused.Exercise 78AcceptanceClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.See yourself in a sandy desert. Write your complaint in thesand.Breathe out. Accept it completely as the truth of what youfeel.Breathe out. Call out your complaint loudly in the desert.Breathe out. See what comes back to you from the desert.Breathe out. What has happened to the writing on thesand?Breathe out. Open your eyes.Your story does not vanish suddenly, but you may notice that your moodlightens. As you continue to work on your inner cleaning, the story shiftsimperceptibly, until one day it is gone. You now have more inner space fornew memories to emerge. It is as if, like the toppling of an old building, theDreamField’s real estate has cleared and new vistas opened up. The“opening of eyes” is continuing to happen. Suddenly you’re rememberingfun times you had with your mom that you had completely obliterated.Remember that this is a work in progress. As my teacher Colette used tosay, “What has been done in time must be undone with time.”Exercise 79The Devastated CityClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Take your child’s hand, and cross a devastated city.Breathe out. Listen to your child’s question. What do youanswer?Breathe out. Keep listening and answering.Breathe out. Come out of the devastated city, and walkaway into green fields. What does your child say now?Breathe out. Open your eyes.If you are still full of painful emotions, doing the next exercise wheneveryou need it will help.Exercise 80Ocean of TearsClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly threesome scientists are suggesting that as much as95 percent of our entire cognitive functioning happens beyond ourconsciousness. Think of what that means: The unconscious in you runs theshow. Wouldn’t you want to know what the unconscious is all about? Butunless you turn yourself into a shaman, a prophet, or an alchemist, how willyou gain access to it? Given that most of you think these people are madmonks or lunatics, you won’t.Freud has said our unconscious mind is full of repressed emotions, darkmemories, and knotted complexes. Social psychologists have proven, innumerous experiments, that our reactions are governed by categorization,stereotyping, and prejudice embedded in the unconscious. But where is thepure survival response of the wild animal? If the unconscious hides only theroots of mental illness, neurosis, and prejudices, where do the holy men andprophets get their inspiration? This puts into question the concept of thetwo-tiered model. A duality, an opposition between the two functions,conscious and unconscious, is a trap from which we cannot escape. Whichone is better? We live in a world where the prevalent view is that consciousthinking is reasonable, sound, and sane, whereas the unconscious mind cantrick or influence us negatively. This is far from the pure survival power ofthe unconscious. What are we missing? Seeing the mind as two-tiered willbias our thinking as much as our prejudices and stereotypes do; in fact, italso is a stereotype. Was there ever another model?Imagine that you are on a frail boat sailing across a vast ocean. Whathappens in your boat—the tiller, the sails, the ropes, your own body, yoursense of observation—are all contained within the hull of the boat, andabove it in the clear light. We’ll call the boat your conscious mind. If youare a modern sailor, below the boat may be much flotsam and garbage. Infact, our oceans carry amalgamations of toxic floating garbage as vast ascontinents. Equate the garbage with your repressed memories, traumas,complexes, stereotypes, prejudices, expectations, and claims, and you’ll seewhy it’s so important not to confuse the garbage with the ocean. Let’s callthis mass of polluted waste your subconscious. Below the garbage, in the asyet unpolluted waters, is the home of the myriad diversity of marine life,aquatic plants, and corals, and the great beasts of the depth. At the deepestpart of the ocean, the old story goes, lies hidden the great serpent,Leviathan. Raising the Leviathan is what happens when, having cleared thesubconscious of its garbage the subconscious and the conscious minds meetin an explosion of light, a revelation. This co-creation is what I call themanifestations of the third mind, the superconscious.To think of the mind as comprising three levels fits what ancient storiestell us about heroes exploring the three levels of Earth, the underworld, andthe sky. Descending from the Earth level into the underworld, the heroHerakles meets Cerberus, who guards the entrance to the underworld. To besure we don’t miss out on the deeper meaning of the myth, the story tells usCerberus has three heads, three levels that Herakles must master (which hedoes with his bare hands) to ascend to Olympus, the heaven of the Greekgods, and become immortal, a god or a star in the firmament. Osiris, Isis,and Horus are the Egyptian trinity, Father, Mother, and Son, the active, thereceptive, and the holy breath that must be mastered to reach enlightenment.The same theme reemerges in the Christian trinity of Father, Son, and HolyGhost. Jesus of Galilee dies and is resurrected in three days. In medievaltimes Dante’s journey takes him through hell and purgatory to paradise. TheTarot’s High Priestess wears the three-tiered crown to remind us that this iswhat we must aspire to. To escape the imprisonment of duality we need themovement through illustrated by the number three. Call these three levelsthe conscious, the subconscious, and the superconscious. In the myth ofNoah’s ark, God, infuriated by the villainy of people on Earth, sends a greatFlood to annihilate them. He warns Noah, whose name means “rest” or“comfort,” to build an ark, a place of refuge against the chaos andsubsequent flooding of the people’s untamed unconscious forces. Accordingto midrash, the ark has three levels, one for the beasts, one for the refuse,and one for the humans. Each level must be tamed, cleared, or visited forcreation to reemerge, whether in the form of a new world, a new life, or atransformed personality. In either case, insight from the superconscious—ina brilliant flash zigzagging past the refuse into consciousness—can changethe course of one’s life.Leviathan, we are told, is the flash of insight. He rises at the call of theholy ones, the ones who dare to plunge. His scales spark colors radiant withrainbow hues and brilliant white. He offers himself up, like truth, on aplatter for the sages’ delectation. The Leviathan’s scales of rainbow lightare reminiscent of the flaring multicolored brilliance of the Holy Grail, or ofthe alchemists’ philosophical stone. It is he—the body-mind that“knows”—that rises up in response to threats to your survival, whetherexternal or internal. When Leviathan rises, the place is flooded with light.And God said, “Let there be light, and there was light.” Here is no place foranything UN-conscious. Keep using that word and your mind willsubliminally hear “unconscious” as meaning unreachable, even by focusedawareness. And since the subconscious is so powerful, this will block thelight from rising.Because the subconscious and the superconscious often appear togetherin a mixed state, I am choosing to use the word subconscious from now onto refer to both. The aim, of course, will be to clear the subconsciousgarbage to reveal the superconscious in its clarity and give it free range toact in our favor, for our survival, and for our joy.Like the heroes of old, the restful ones, the holy men and women whodare, can you also plunge into the underworld where creation is awaitingthe jolt of your presence to emerge, like the great beast from tohu va’bohu?How do you provoke the information hidden in the magma of the chaos?My goal here is proving to you that you can do what the old ones did. Thisbook will guide you through the swamps, jungles, and deserts of your innersubconscious landscape. Like Herakles, you will find the tools andresources to deal with your Nemean lion, your Augean stables full ofexcrement, your Stymphalian birds screeching in your ear. You will learn torespond to the necessity of the images that surface in your mind, thusclearing the path for the superconscious to emerge. Will you find the light?Yes, you will. This is a tried and true path to enlightenment, based on theknowledge of thousands of years of studying the plunge, and verified bymany initiates’ successes in attaining light and what Jewish sages calldveikut, the cleaving of the self to the divine.*15 This Kabbalah ofdreaming†16 is also called the Kabbalah of light or Saphire®.‡17 Saphire isunique among other forms of Kabbalah, in that it limits its practice to theimagination and visualizations to access higher levels of consciousness.Whereas other schools use letters and chanting or mediations on the void,Saphire only works with dreams, day visions, waking dreams, and guidedimagery exercises to climb the ladder to dveikut. While the practiceincorporates Jewish concepts, you do not need to be a Kabbalist or evenJewish to do this practice; everyone dreams.What does this book offer you? Food for both your conscious and yoursubconscious minds. You will be led step-by-step through the methodologyand tools to tap into your subconscious, thus satisfying the needs of yourconscious mind. Simultaneously, through practicing the visual exercisesyou will find in this book, you will be plunged into the wondrousexperience of your subconscious mind. There are no words,times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine that you are crying all the tears in your body. Seethem pouring out of your eyes and gathering in a pool at yourfeet.Breathe out. Continue to cry. See the pool become a lake,and then an ocean.Breathe out. Dive into the ocean, and swim downwardtoward the center of the ocean. Find the treasure that’swaiting for you there.Breathe out. Swim off to the other shore. Come out of theocean carrying your treasure.Breathe out. Put the treasure down. Dry yourself in thesunlight.Breathe out. Pick up your treasure; what do you have?Breathe out. Look over your left shoulder; what hashappened to the ocean?Breathe out. Walk away, taking your treasure with you.Breathe out. Open your eyes.Having cleared the physical, emotional and mental bodies as best wecan today, let us see if we can forge a working collaboration between thethree kings.Exercise 81The Three Wise KingsClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.See, feel, and know what has kept your three kings fromcollaborating? Which king sees himself as superior? Whichking sees himself as undervalued and victimized?Breathe out. Find a way to make peace between the threekings.Breathe out. See, feel, and know what gift your wise king,the body, is giving you.Breathe out. What gift does the wise king of your heartgive you?Breathe out. What does the wise king of your mind giveyou?Breathe out. See how the three wise kings can collaborateto guide you to the next revelation on your path.Breathe out. Know that step-by-step each revelation onyour path grows your inner light and reveals more and moreof the child of light that is uniquely you.Breathe out. Open your eyes, seeing with open eyes thenext image on your path.The return journey to reclaim our innocence is not easy. We must deal withthe shepherds and their flock. One stray animal, one instinct gone awry,compromises the whole flock. We must also deal with the beasts that havestrayed into the manger. They appear tamed, but one movement askew andthe bull might lose its temper, the cow might stop producing milk, and thedonkey might refuse to budge. We’ll get back to the flock—our instincts—and the beasts—our emotions. Meanwhile the greatest obstacle to thejourney—while also its major protagonists—turns out to be our twostewards, the mother and the father to the light being we are longing andsearching for. They are the two pillars to the inner sanctum. Entering orexiting is impossible without passing between those two.Exercise 82Honoring Your ParentClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Imagine that you stand opposite your parent. Pay attentionto what you feel in your body. Pay attention to anyconstriction, darkness, or difficulty.Breathe out. Having localized the pain, put your hand thereand vocalize it, sounding out the constriction, darkness, ordifficulty, until it has left your body.Breathe out. Breathe in the blue radiant light from the skyto fill the newly cleared areas with blue light.Breathe out. Looking at your parent now, accept the truthof who your parent is. What changes then?Breathe out. Thank your parent for giving you life. Bow inhonor and gratitude.(If you cannot do this, understand that your parents areonly the parents of your physical body.Breathe out. See who the parents of your emotional body,mental body, spirit body are. Honor them and bow to them.)Breathe out. Open your eyes.Are we compelled to love our parents? No. The fourth commandmentdoesn’t mention love, it asks us to honor them and recognize theirprimordial necessity. For those of you who’ve studied the Hekhalotliterature,*111 the texts describe an aspirant’s quest to enter the palace gates,only to be confronted by two guards, mother and father, to the passageway.Their duality is the first test. Playing one against the other will not work.The aspirant will be beaten back, twisted into unnatural shapes and frozenin his incapacity to go beyond the guards. Being entirely dependent for hissurvival on his parents, a child is the aspirant who cannot transcend hisguards/parents and must find unnatural ways to adapt.Exercise 83Heroic MeasuresClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.See, feel, and know what heroic measures you took toprotect yourself in a dysfunctional family or environment.Breathe out. Recognize how those heroic measures nolonger serve you well.Breathe out. What better way do you choose today toprotect yourself?Breathe out. Open your eyes.Understand that to tame the two great powers standing in your way, youmust first remove their negative image inside yourself. When those violent,angry images inside you are gone, you will find that the threateningguardians have disappeared, and lo and behold! Here are your parents,manageable human beings with character flaws, and qualities you canadmire. Nothing has been said, but your parents will have subliminallypicked up that your shape has changed, and they will have no choice but tosubconsciously change their own inner shape. Remember how thebasketball hoop inevitably attracts a basketball? If your solar plexus iscollapsed inwardly, some round object, such as a ball, a fist, or a head, willcome to fill the cavity. If you straighten up and fill out your solar plexus,the ball, the fist, the head will not seek you out. It cannot be otherwise inthe DreamField, where inner shapes fit into each other like pieces of apuzzle. Change your inner shape, and the guardians will have no choice butto change theirs.Exercise 84Taking Your Parents Out of Your BodyBreathe out slowly three times, counting from three to one.See the one as tall, clear, and bright.Turn your eyes inward, and looking into your whole body,find what part your mother resides in.Breathe out. What part does your father reside in?Breathe out. How do you feel with your parents within?See the reason for them to be in this specific body part.Breathe out. Slowly remove your parent out of you. If youdon’t succeed immediately, try removing them with your twohands. Breathe out. If this doesn’t succeed, do it with a knife.Breathe out. Place your parent to your right or to your left,as you see fit.Breathe out. Pour cool spring water over the areas thatyour parents have just vacated. Ask every cell in your body toreturn to its natural healthy alignment.Breathe out, and open your eyes, feeling free and whole.Maintaining this new posture means you’re also going to have to change thehabitual emotional pathways that have traditionally accompanied thenegative images of your two guardians/parents. Let’s say that for years,you’ve been frightened or angry. Anger and fear are primary emotions, yourfight-or-flight response. But since you haven’t been able to express them(the guardians/parents have made it impossible), your energies have beenrepressed and are banging around inside your body like wild beasts in acage. These trapped energies, we’ll call them secondary emotions, alwaysmanifest through a contraction. Their pathways are deeply imprinted inyour physical body. Map them out by observing their pathways in yourbody next time you feel frustration. Do the same for sadness, depression,anxiety, shame, guilt, resentment, jealousy, doubt, and other emotions. Ifyou turn your eyes into your body you’ll also see that they sport unpleasantcolors such as bloody reds, khaki greens, or other mixed or glaring colors.These colors should remind you of the nefesh*112 level on the dream ladder,for indeed your trapped emotions are a reason you have nightmarish,repetitive, or busy dreams.Exercise 85Emotions and FeelingsBreathe out slowly three times, counting from three to one.save a poet’s,that can come anywhere close to describing the experience of the innerlight. I will not even attempt to express its power and wonder. Each of youhas a unique version of the interior world, like an individual signature theworld has been waiting for. By activating your inner vision, you make yourouter world more real, alive, and exciting. Try the exercises, and you willfall in love with your creative power to transform yourself and—oh,surprise—to change your world.In the time-honored practice of plunging, methodologies have variedslightly. Shamans put more emphasis on rituals, fasting, chanting, ordrumming. In their mystery rituals, the Greeks liked to embody their gods’myths, employing theatrical illusions, rituals, and mirrors. TibetanBuddhists use very rigorous and specific forms of visualizations of theBuddhas. The Sufis still practice the movements of the dhikr dance toinduce mystical visions and heart-to-heart devotion to the teacher,representative on Earth of the perfect man. The founder of the ChristianJesuit order, Ignatius of Loyola, trained his priests in the imitation of Jesusof Galilee, using visualizations he called Spiritual Exercises. Jewish, Sufi,and Christian saints and mystics all over the world, throughout time, haveplunged into waking dreams to imagine their emotional connection to worldalignment and to the first man before the fall. And of course, the Kabbalists,whose methods we will be exploring together, use visualizations, chanting,movements, permutations of letters to restore the Garden of Eden on Earth.All masters of dreaming use parable, allegory, and metaphor to unveil thehidden mystery of the interior world, ne’elam, behind what the Hebrewmasters call the olam, or world of reality.Practicing your imagination as prescribed by the Kabbalists is notdifficult. It requires very little time; just a minute or two every morning andnight will suffice. You need nothing but a place to sit and be quiet. Closeyour eyes, and follow the inductions in the book; they act as a windowopening into your subconscious. The subconscious response isinstantaneous and free-flowing. Contrary to the Tibetan practices, theKabbalists do not fixate on an image, but see it and let it go. It is in theexploration of many different perspectives of the interior that a fountain ofcreativity bubbles up, and paradoxically, a solidification of light takes formwithin you. Unblocked and gushing up toward the blue skies, your fountainof creativity connects your three levels and you to the whole universe. Youwill never again feel abandoned or alone.Imagine sitting at your desk, lethargic before a difficult report you’ve beenagonizing over, and slowly drifting into a half sleep. Suddenly from behinda bush, a leopard springs at you, roaring and sporting its sharp canines,smelling of beast, black spots vibrating. Wild, strong energy coursesthrough your body. Subversive ideas flash through your mind. The leopardis an experience that shakes you awake. Where does it come from? You’renot in a jungle. Or maybe you’re in the jungle of your subconscious. Asyour eyes turn inward, the subconscious magma coalesces into a revelation.You may not mentally understand your image, but the powerful experienceenergizes and enlivens you. Now you are furiously writing, and your ideasare unexpected and fresh.The Hebrew Bible tells us that on the seventh day, God stopped creatingin order to la’asot, to make.1 In other words, stir the pot, but then stop to letthe food cook to perfection. When you stop agonizing over your report—through sleep, rest, or simply entering into an empty state of mind—yourcreative magma can coalesce, and it will manifest one aspect of you, theleopard springing to the task. “The soul never thinks without an image,”says Aristotle, and your leopard proves his point.But don’t fixate on your leopard. Don’t turn him into a mascot or anarchetype. He has played his part in your creation adventure. Let him go.You can trust that the creative flow will coalesce into another image, just aspotent and full of creativity, to deal with another challenge you’re facing.The subconscious, as one student put it, is a “massive oceanic riddle.”We’re going to jump into this oceanic riddle and start playing with themyriad forms, colors, textures, numbers, puns, patterns, and emotionalsubtleties. “Close your eyes, breathe out three times, slowly counting fromthree to one. Turn your eyes into the darkness of your body. Whathappens?”—“I’m going down a mysterious tunnel, down, down, until Ireach a closed door.”—“Do you want to open it?”—“Oh, yes, I’m socurious! When I open the door . . . I step into a world of light, gemlike, andthis warm loving feeling envelops me.” Doesn’t this remind you of the heroAladdin of One Thousand and One Nights? He too explores his inner caveand finds it filled with treasure. The more you venture into yoursubconscious looking with eyes wide shut,*18 the more you activate yourDreamField™†19 and “make” or manifest yourself in the endlessly creativemode of your soul. The more, in other words, you grow yoursuperconsciousness.When your conscious mind turns toward your subconscious mind, liketwo lovers, they activate each other, creating together a world of joy andmagic. Bereft of its companion, your conscious mind lives in linearity, itsdaily routine of toil and trouble, its obstacles, its painful ending in death,become more and more stifling and exhausting. The conscious mind lives inthe manifest world, olam. But turned toward its partner, the subconscious, itbegins to loosen its ties to causal effects and looks instead below the storyline to patterns, light effects, shifts in emotional texture. The hidden world,ne’elam, the sub rosa country of its partner, the subconscious, rises to thesurface of your consciousness. “I see a temple, flanked by a column on theright, and a column on the left. In the center is a clear reflective pool, and init are five pink flamingoes! Their pink is so brilliant my heart starts topound. I’m filled with wonder.” Life becomes a “many splendoredthing,”*20 a love affair, telling you to “follow your bliss.”†21 But if you sayto yourself, “I can’t leave my husband; we have health insurance, the house,the children, the plush life . . .” the pink flamingoes in their reflective poolvanish, and so do joy, wonderment, and love. Can you look into the eyes ofyour inner beloved and accept that by following your images you will find acreative way out of the mess of your life? Or will you tuck your dreamsaway into a drawer, never to revisit them?Let’s go on a treasure hunt, for indeed that is what Kabbalists call it, theSod, the treasure. If you tap into the treasure trove of your ne’elam, you willfind the new configuration your soul is crying out for. Your images willanchor you in the new configuration, and grow your courage to pursue yourdreams. Soon you will experience the way opening up easily and withoutpain. But don’t believe me, why should you? Take the plunge, and verifyfor yourself. Have I convinced you to at least dip your eyes in? Will youfollow me on this journey into your reunion with yourself?The Leviathan story being about the subterranean movements of yourpsyche and their transformations will guide you. It guided me, as I didn’tchoose to write this book; it chose me. The inner voice said I was to write abook about “Raising the Leviathan.” I didn’t question the voice, as I havelearned to always follow the promptings of my subconscious. But I had tolearn about the Leviathan, and his story told me what I was being asked towrite about. The great beast of the deep, Leviathan, is our subconscious, thecreative magma we are asked to raise to consciousness and tame into formin our work as co-creators with God.Like a dream, the myth presents what appear to be contradictorystatements.We are told Leviathan has neither beginning nor end. “His tail isplaced inhis mouth”2 and he is “twisting around and encompassing the wholeworld.”3 Here he represents the basic unity underlying the whole universe.His name means “the wreathed one,” entwining the many different strandsof an underlying reality that is energetic, unseen, and subconscious.“Were it not that he lies on the deep and presses down upon it, it wouldcome up and destroy the world and inundate it.”4 In essence, separatingclearly the conscious mind from a subconscious oceanic inundation isnecessary for our survival and sanity. For God said, “Let the waters beneathheaven be gathered into one area, and let dry land appear.”5 We need bothour conscious mind and our subconscious mind to work in tandem.The one inundation we know of happened in Noah’s generation “when theEarth became corrupt before God” and He allowed “all the fountains of thegreat deep (to) burst forth”6 and flood the dry lands, drowning all those whohad not listened to their subconscious and had become corrupted. In Noah’sstory we are told how to avoid the inundation. Build an ark, enter it, andturn your eyes within. Like Noah, whose name means “rest,” rest withinyourself, dream.We are also told that the inundating waters rose up boiling hot, as (I amputting the two stories together: Nowhere else are boiling waters talkedabout except in Noah’s story and in the Leviathan story) a Leviathanuntamed, filled with fear and rage, “sends forth from his mouth a heat sogreat as to make all the waters of the deep boil.”7On this fierceness of the sea monster, his untamed emotions “HaShem willbring punishment with his harsh, great, mighty sword, upon Leviathan, thebar-like [male] serpent, and upon the twisting [female] serpent, and he willkill the great fish in the sea.”8 For Leviathan is not meant to be linear orentangled. We must cut ourselves from purely linear thinking, (the bar-likeserpent) and from our emotional or mental entanglements (the twistingserpent) to reincorporate the larger reality that is holistic andphenomenological (the serpent who bites his own tail).He was created to rise and “frolic with” God.9 Surrender to the promptingsof the subconscious, play in its ocean with all the forms that bubble up. Thisis what God meant your life to be like, effortless and fun.Thus when the Leviathan transforms his emotions “he ascends. In his wake,a path shines. Nothing on Earth can compare to him, he was made to bewithout fear. He looks down on everything elevated. He is the king over allthe haughty.”10 The Leviathan is our kundalini, the powerful divinefeminine energy that Jews call Shekhinah. By instigating the raising of theLeviathan, we connect Earth and sky.And God offers the sweetness of the Leviathan’s transformation, histransfigured flesh as a “feast for the righteous in the time to come.”11Following the path of the Leviathan brings enlightenment.This is a journey back to the pure light of Eden, where human and God gazeinto each other and become one. This can only be accomplished bydreaming.The book is divided into three parts.The first part deals with the methodology of tapping into thesubconscious, the different ways that you can “cross over,” get answers toyour questions, and return safely from your voyage. It also shows you howto dialogue with your images, dealing, as you go, with the obstacles in yourpath. This is called tikun, “correction,” and is your most effective tool fortransformation and growth. As the subconscious responds, you will learn torecognize what the signs of transformation are. You will experience how thesubconscious is the source of all creativity and leads directly tomanifestation.The second part is about using the power of the subconscious to bettermanage your life. The subconscious is the ground of your being. It is anoceanic mass as vast as the universe. Its currents, whirlpools, swamps, andstorms are what the Bible poetically calls Leviathan, the great beast of thedeep. His thrashings to and fro are a manifestation of your untamedemotions and memories that need to be acknowledged and weeded out. Toquiet the movements of the Leviathan and learn to tame our beast is the aimof all those who wish to become wise. Your wounded child, your fixedcomplexes, your ancestral patterns, your relationship blocks, your timeissues—all your healing will depend on what is happening below thesurface of your conscious mind. How your subconscious moves will showyou whether it is troubled or peaceful. The premise of this book is that allstarts with the subconscious. Attempting to change yourself by changingyour conscious mind or behavior will not work. The root of your blockages,belief systems, and pernicious behaviors is in the subconscious. You mustfirst change the subconscious. When you do that, the vast oceanic mass ofmovements, your Leviathan, will become rhythmic and peaceful. Thewaters will become translucent. Each chapter will deal with one of theissues mentioned above.The third part of the book is bringing to light the superconscious, thesoul, the blueprint you came into this world with. I call this work Raisingthe Leviathan. Through a technique that we will examine called the LifePlan, through prayer and through dveikut, cleaving to the divine, you willflip over from being blinded by the conscious mind to being exalted by theintrinsic magnificence and beauty of creation. I hope that by the end of thebook, you will have transformed so much, that like the holy ones, you willbe able to commune with the flesh of the great beast of the depth and knowthe joy that an illuminated consciousness brings.I wish you joy of the plunge. May you play and frolic in the waves ofthe oceanic subconscious and learn to trust and become fast friends with themysterious source of all creativity.How to Practice the ExercisesTo help you to experience and work with your subconscious, you will find,in every chapter, a number of guided imagery exercises that you canpractice on your own. These exercises are meant to be done quickly. Theyshould take no longer than one to three minutes, unless otherwise indicated.Do them once, and don’t repeat for three months, unless advised otherwise.Exercises called “formal” are to be practiced every day in the morning orevening as indicated, for twenty-one days from the new moon onward, formen and for women in menopause. For the younger women, practice themfrom the end of one menstrual period to the beginning of the next. Formalexercises build new habits. You practice them as indicated for only onecycle. If you desire to continue a formal practice, vary the exercises.Practice a different formal exercise each cycle. In this way, yoursubconscious doesn’t get bored but has time to catch on to the rhythm andincorporate the images.*22At first, learn to do your exercises sitting, back straight, hands and legsuncrossed like an Egyptian pharaoh. As you become more proficient, youwill be able to do the exercises, standing or lying down, eyes open orclosed. But to start with, find a quiet space where you’ll be undisturbed fora few minutes. Sit up straight, with your arms and legs uncrossed so as notto mix the energies. Close your eyes. Slightly open your mouth, and breatheout slowly through your mouth, seeing the number 3. Breathe out, and seethe number 2. Breathe out, and see the number 1, tall and clear. Why do webreathe out? We empty our body of the carbon dioxide, the gaseous refusein the body. When we are empty, the breath comes in on its own easily; youhave nothing to do. We count from 3 to 1 as a light self-hypnotic induction.All it takes is three exhalations to reach the depth of the subconscious.Most of the exercises are very short and give you thirty seconds to aminute or two to look through the metaphoric window into thesubconscious created by the words of the induction. When you go fast youhave no time to indulge in fantasy. Breathe out, look through the window,seewhat you see, and open your eyes.Notes on TerminologyIf you don’t resonate with the word “God,” please feel free to substitutewhatever word feels right for you. For instance, you could use “universalconsciousness.”Throughout the book I use the words “male” and “female” to representarchetypal energies rather than types of people. For instance, a man can befemale in sensibility, a woman male in intellect. When speaking of couples,I am not exclusively speaking of the classic malefemale coupling; couplesof all sexual orientations follow the same inner male and female tensions. Inthe subconscious realm switching genders is common. If you are a womanin real life, you may see yourself as a male in the dream world, and viceversa, a man may see himself as a woman. These shifts occur until we havelearned to balance male and female energies in ourselves and become one,like the androgynous Adam before the exile from Eden.PART IThe Leviathan, Great Beast of theDeepFishing in the Ocean of the SubconsciousTCall Me and I shall answer you, and tell you great tidings,and obscurities that you did not know.JEREMIAH 33:2here are simple ways of tapping into the subconscious. Themethodology I will be describing in the next chapters requires nothingfrom you but a paper, a pen, and a firm intention of piercing throughthe veil of our everyday reality. The subconscious is elusive. You must let itknow you are pursuing it with neither violence nor possessiveness.Sometimes it comes as a little child you can’t fool with false protestationsof love. Sometimes it comes as a woman, and she won’t respond well tobullying, PowerPoint presentations, logical proofs, or statistics; she wantsto be seduced, adored, and revered. Visualize a sunset. Scientific analysesconcerning its many-colored splendor are not preeminent to your mind. Youare immersed and enchanted. How refreshing is that?The subconscious is also the receptacle for all your pains, fears, angers,resentments, and envy. It will show you your monsters and ghosts, yourfogs and dark holes, your bogs and illusions, but it will also give youmagnificent tools to overcome the obstacles that block the flow of itsimaginal ocean. In its varied forms and rapid transformations, thesubconscious is both its own diagnostic and its cure. It is ever in movement,and when you can accept that “change is the one thing that never changes,”1it stabilizes you while gifting you with fireworks of light and joy.While the methodology is simple, you will be asked to step back, wait,stay awake, and be attentive. Give it your respect and devotion, preciselywhat you so desire from your own family and peers. Watch the mystery, andrespond with excitement, gratitude, wonder, and awe! The subconsciouswill “open sesame,”2 and reveal its treasures.T1The Mystery of DreamsWhatever a man does in the day, his soul testifies againsthim at night.ZOHAR 92Aruth is a pathless land.”*23 To access the truth of the superconscious,we must, each and every one of us, find the pathless land. How do wedrop into it? We are faced with the impossible task: “Go where I willshow you.” But where? The abyss between our conscious mind and oursubconscious appears insurmountable, yet we constantly receive glimpses,elusive signposts, and alluring tidbits. Most of them appear to us in nightdreams, others in daytime clips or sound bites. To start exploring how wetap into the subconscious, we will begin where accessing the subconsciousoccurs naturally and nightly. I am speaking about our night dreams.Since night dreams are a universal phenomenon, we can speak aboutour dreams without appearing foolish or eccentric. Why do we dream?Does tapping into our subconscious have important beneficial effects on ourhealth and balance? What physiological function do dreams have? The pop-ups of our night dreams beg the question: What are they trying to tell us?Do we need them for our survival? And if so, why do they configurethemselves in these incomprehensible ways? Gifted with these strangeunfolding images that we don’t understand, what are we supposed to dowith them?Dreams are a phenomenon common to humans and other mammals.Sleep laboratories have shown that we all dream, especially, scientistsbelieve, during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Some modern scientistshave suggested that dreams are the glut of our brain processes. “We dreamto forget,”1 say Francis Crick and Graeme Mitchison, and our dreams aresimply garbage on the way to being discarded from memory. ProfessorAllan Hobson and his colleague Robert McCarley see dreaming as theresult of a sudden barrage of stimulation just prior to REM that the higherbrain then attempts to make sense of.2 Their activation synthesis theory hassince been disproved, leaving room for other theories, such as the memoryconsolidation theory of dreaming (we dream to remember) and theexpectation fulfillment theory of dreaming (dreams are the arousal, de-arousal process of an emotion whose expectation the brain fulfills throughthe unfolding of images). This is a far cry from Freud’s wish fulfillmenttheory of dreams, which was predicated on their symbolic meaning.A study of the biological function of dreams shows us that there aremany physiological processes involved in the act of dreaming. Breathingpatterns, blood flow to the brain, and brain activity change during REMsleep. Many scientists prefer to think that dreams are simply biologicalprocesses with no conscious or psychological meaning. If so, we could saythe same of our thought processes: They are nothing more than biologicalactivity. Subtracting meaning from our lives by reducing every activity inour bodies to biological functions doesn’t serve us. Would a piece of meat(biological matter) be interested in studying the meaning of dreams? Sinceour consciousness is alive and asking questions, we have to assume thatwithin or beyond the piece of meat (our biological processes) somethingelse is happening. A dualistic approach—we’re either biological matter orembodied souls—sends us back to concerns common to philosophers andtheologians of the Middle Ages. And while the seventeenth century scientistand philosopher René Descartes*24 searched for a way to link these twoseemingly irreconcilable activities—the body that worked like a machine,and the soul/consciousness that was nonmaterial—through the pineal gland,he was still caught in a duality. Today we are not looking for thephysiological seat of the soul, but our thinking has not evolved beyondwarring opinions. Scientists group themselves squarely in the biologicalcamp and believe that the body has no consciousness. “What is at stake hereis a theory of dreams that is scientifically valid,” says Dr. Hobson, and heproceeds to discount the psychoanalytic dream interpretation. The realproblem is not who is right or wrong, but framing the issue within a duality.What we need to do is break out of that confinement. Instead, could we notsay that consciousness arises out of biological processes—or vice versa,that biological processes arise out of consciousness? Could both be true?In DreamBirth I point out that dreaming is not limited to REM stages ofsleep.3 While REM may contain peak moments of dream activity, in fact weare always dreaming. Dreaming is a survival faculty of the brain. Again,Descartes famously said: “I think, therefore I am.” What people forget isthat he dreamed this statement. Maybe he meant that any form ofconsciousness should be called thinking. In this sense, is there anydifference between thinking and dreaming? They are both forms ofcommunication that employ different languages. Can we compare hearing“I love you” to being kissed? We engage in both verbal and sensoryexchanges. The sensory exchanges are read on our mind’s screen as 3Dimages synergistic with all our senses. Verbal exchanges are abstractconcepts. They used to be descriptive of sensory exchanges,but today, thelink between our bodies and verbal concepts grows more and more tenuous.Which came first? Brain imaging on humans shows that in REM dreaming,our limbic system, a more ancient brain structure (not as ancient as thereptilian brain, though we know that reptiles dream) is highly active.Thinking in words developed much later with the appearance of theprefrontal cortex. Today we are trained to prioritize verbal information atthe expense of experiencing.Dreaming is another word for experiencing. Experiencing the worldaround us, and also inside of us, means that we process the world throughour senses. Through our senses, we feel, hear, see, smell, and taste. This isnot information, but in-form-ation, coming directly from apprehendingform. This vast container of experiences that we, like the alchemist, sit inand are made of, is alive in a matrix of knowing that I call the DreamField.How do we know that all experiences and their 3D images, sensations, andemotions are contained within our brain matrix? One of the models of thebrain is that we discard unnecessary parts of our memories and keep onlythat which is necessary to our survival. Maybe we put them to sleep, storedaway for future use. We do know that memories are clustered together byform and similar patterns. We will return to this when we study thelanguage of the night dream. But does it mean that we forget and discard?Memories of long forgotten experiences will surface at unexpectedmoments, under the effect of a rare stimulus. Where were they hidden allthis time? What did our brains do with them while we were apparentlytotally unaware of them? Or are our brains simply consoles reading in-FORM-ation coming from the cells of our bodies? Does memory ofexperience truly disappear for good? “I never forget anything,” said onefriend, to which another replied, “How do you know?” We can never know.But we can learn to watch them surface. Here are three exercises to watchthe subconscious surface.Exercise 1Awake while Falling AsleepClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Lying in your bed before falling asleep, relax completely,feeling your limbs and trunk become heavier and heavier.Breathe out. Stay awake while watching yourself fallingasleep. You will begin to feel that you are floating. If youremain conscious while falling asleep, you will experience aflood of chaotic images. Don’t try to make any sense of them,just observe until sleep takes over.Maybe you’ve had a similar experience while lying on a massage table.This phase of chaotic images flooding your rapidly disappearingconsciousness is called the hypnagogic stage. This dreamlike stage can alsosurface when you have had a terrible shock, and the world suddenly makesno sense. You are crossing the veil, as did Perceval, but you haven’t yetlearned to do this consciously and to hold these images steady in yourmind’s eye. Don’t try just yet. But sit a moment with yourself and do thisnext exercise.Exercise 2Looking into Your BodyClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Feel your body just now. Turn your eyes inward. What doyou observe: constriction or expansion, light or dark, densityor pulsation?Breathe out. What feelings do you have?Breathe out. What question do you want to ask it? Does itrespond? If it does, what does this say about your body?Breathe out. Open your eyes.Your body is not what you think it is. When you turn your eyes inwardto look into your body, your body starts shifting and doing things you neverthought it could. Your body is not solid, nor is it fixed, as you believed. Itsboundaries are more fluid. When your consciousness pays attention to yourbody, your body starts reconfiguring. It is porous and can stretch, contract,dissolve, and remake itself. The key is the interface between yourconsciousness and your body.Exercise 3Enter Your ThumbClose your eyes. Breathe out slowly three times, countingfrom three to one. See the one tall, clear, and bright.Bring your eyes into your body, and down your right arminto your thumb. Be totally in your thumb. Only your thumbexists, and your consciousness occupies your thumb. What ishappening to your experience of your thumb?Breathe out. Bring your consciousness back into yourwhole body.Breathe out. Open your eyes.You are the observer affecting the observed: Your watching is thedialogue your body needs to respond and to change. If you are able tototally bring your consciousness into your thumb and nothing else exists foryou at that moment except your thumb, your thumb will start growing. Itwill become pulsating energy, then light, and will grow larger. “The bodyorganizes and incorporates experience,” says Stanley Keleman in hiswonderful book Your Body Speaks Its Mind.4 Or you fix your body by yourway of looking at it. It will adapt to how you see it, talk of it, or think aboutit. If you believe your body has fixed boundaries, it will adapt to your beliefsystem. It will conform to the stories you tell yourself. Your individualDreamField and your larger familial and generational DreamField(experiences of the family stories and patterns) are the tapestry or networkaround which your body takes form. Looking at a body is like reading anopen book, if you are alive to what it is trying to tell you.You also have a cultural DreamField, a national DreamField, a universalDreamField. Carl Jung called our universal DreamField the collectiveunconscious. Others have called it the Akashic records. All these differentdreamfields are interacting networks of experience, cauldrons of imagesthat make us who and how we are. Your subconscious is a container,impressed by the experiences it is filled with. It has no power to changethose impressions. Because it is part of your subconscious, your bodycannot change itself unless you consciously look into your body and allowit to show you its dreaming. Your experiencing body interacting with yourconscious looking is your dreaming.Since our dreaming is the ground of our being, it is even moreimperative for us to understand our dreaming. If only 5 percent of us isconscious, how do we interact with the other 95 percent? How do we knowthat we are connected to the collective unconscious or to the Akashicrecords*25 since they are both said to be unconscious? The mystery oftapping into your subconscious starts by turning your eyes inward to look.We have two ways of doing this: in the daytime with guided exercises suchas the three you have just experienced, or with your night dreams. We willtalk more about guided exercises in the chapters that follow, but in this firstchapter we will focus primarily on night dreams.Most rabbis will tell you that God thought the world into being. I once hadthe audacity to tell a great Talmudic scholar that I thought God had dreamedthe world into being. “God thought the world into being!” he emphaticallydeclared, then turned on his heels and marched away. If you agree with him,you’re in good company! And I promise you, I won’t take it badly. Butbeing a dreamer, an Ivri or passer-over,*26 I am made in the image of God. Iam His mirror image. All mirror images are dreams. If I step into the mirrorand stand in God’s shoes (not that he has any), looking out at myself, I amHis dream come true. I come back through the mirror into my body, and Iread in Genesis: “God hovered over the p’nei tehom. And God said, ‘Letthere be light.’ And there was light.” † 27 I am a product of this light.Mirroring God, how do I do what He does? When I go to sleep, this isexactly what I do. I hover over the subconscious, and I create light.Have you ever wondered how this inner illumination works? The sun’srays do not penetrate inside your body, and there are no electric bulbs toilluminate the space within. Inside of you it