Other Realms: Dreams & Inner Guidance

Sleep is supposed to be a time of peace and relaxation. Most of us drift from our waking lives into predictable cycles of deep, non-rapid-eye-movement sleep, followed by dream-filled rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep. But when the boundaries of these three phases of arousal get fuzzy, sleep can be downright scary. In fact, some sleep disorders seem more at home in horror films than in your bedroom.

Avatar is the movie James Cameron has been dreaming about for over 20 years. It took that long for the technology to catch up with his vision. Worth it? Yeah, worth it. I usually only see movies in the theater if something is guaranteed to blow up. Avatar met this requirement, and if you wear the 3D glasses, exceeded it. Beyond the explosions and mind-numbing CG goodness, Avatar is a film I recommend for dreamers everywhere.

Having spent all of my adult life tapping into the remarkable world of dreams and dreaming, I'm a BIG fan of dreams. I've personally received so much help from my dreams -- breakthroughs, healings, guidance, glimpses of the divine -- that I think this world would be a much happier, healthier place if more people spent time cultivating a relationship with their dreams, and dreaming selves. So here's another Christmas present for you: a free 30-page ebook from Ryan Hurd...

Starting in 1912, Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), a specialist in the treatment of schizophrenia, began to experience strange dreams and frightening visions. Once when returning home on a train, the 38-year-old Swiss psychologist hallucinated that everywhere he looked he could see nothing but "rivers of blood." In one enigmatic dream a bird-girl hauntingly announced, "Only in the first hour of the night can I become human, while the male dove is busy with the twelve dead"; in another he encountered a wise old man, with wings, holding four keys. After a while, Jung began to carry on conversations with the winged "Philemon" during his daytime walks.

"Themes of mortality, depression, and sickness outnumber themes of happiness, bliss, and rapture in dreams 4 to 1."

"Our culture defends itself against the dark truths of dreaming cognition with the cheap belief that dreams are light, fluffy, random, and mostly about our mother’s sex appeal."

This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome...

There’s less than 2 weeks until the premiere Dreaming event on the web.  I’m talking about the 2009 PsiberDreaming conference: a two week online conference that features over two dozen presentations from leaders in the fields of dream research and consciousness studies...

Arison -- billionaire ($2.7 by Forbes's most recent estimate), perhaps the richest woman in the Middle East, a major force in Israeli philanthropy -- claims that she can see the future. This is much bigger than a parlor trick. In her new book published this summer in Israel, the 51-year-old Miami native says she felt the Indonesian tsunami sweeping over the land two months before it happened and sensed Hurricane Katrina pummeling New Orleans. In an interview, Arison says she also "saw the writing on the wall" before the global economic crash. Reading about Arison's extrasensory perception makes you ache for a heads-up, maybe a blog entry or a tweet or a phone call to Brownie or Greenspan or somebody who might have helped.

Let's talk about group dream work and how to start your own local dream sharing group.