Unzipping Your Pillow

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Unzipping Your Pillow

• Actualizing Your Deep Creativity

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What are we getting into...

• Dreams
• Inspiration
• Raw creativity

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Dreams are a treasure trove...

• Famous creative dreamers
• Artists
• Writers
• Philosophers
• Scientists
• Inventers

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What Are Dreams?

• Indigestion response
• Garbage dump
• Information processing
• Messages from the unconscious
• Messages from the Divine Consciousness

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Puccini said dreams were The conscious
purposeful appropriation of ones own
soul-forces
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Freud called dreams the royal highway to the
unconscious.
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Famous Creative Dreams
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Sir Frederick Grant Banting found his laboratory
procedure for the mass production of insulin in a
dream he had.
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Poet, John Berryman's masterpiece was The Dream
Songs, which he began writing after he started
keeping a dream journal.
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Neils Bohr dreamed of a planetary system as a
model for atoms. Awarded Nobel Prize in Physics
for this.
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Samuel Taylor Coleridges famous poem, Xanadu
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Descartes- theory of logic and reasoning came to
him in a dream
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The German poet Goethe described the writing of
his novel, Werther, telling a friend I wrote
the book almost unconsciously, like a
somnambulist, and was amazed when I realized what
I had done.
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Elias Howe- tribe of savages with needle spears
with holes in their points.
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Kekules snake and the benzene ring atomic
structure the carbon chain at the molecular core
of the compound does indeed form a chain that
swallows its own tail.
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D. I. Medeleev I saw in a dream a table where
all the elements fell into place as
required.The Periodic Table
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Rudyard Kiplings Jungle Book, Kim and both Puck
books came from his dreams
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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow In writing of an
inspirational dream he had wrote I felt pleased
with the ballad. It hardly cost me any effort. It
did not come into my mind by lines, but by
stanzas (in my dreams).
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Otto Lowei 1936 Nobel Prize in Physiology and
Medicine The night before Easter Sunday of
that year (1920) I awoke, turned on the light,
and jotted down a few notes on a tiny slip of
thin paper.
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Then I fell asleep again. It occurred to me at
six oclock in the morning that during the night
I had written down something important, but I was
unable to decipher the scrawl.
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The next night, at three oclock, the idea
returned. It was the design of an experiment to
determine whether or not the hypothesis of
chemical transmission that I had uttered 17 years
ago was correct.
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I got up immediately, went to the laboratory, and
performed a simple experiment on a frogs heart
according to the nocturnal design
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Its results became the foundation of the theory
of chemical transmission of the nervous impulse.
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Paul McCartney- Yesterday The song and its
arrangement came to him in a dream.
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Ramanujuan, mathematician extraordinaire, said a
Hindu goddess presented him with formulas in his
dreams.
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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart All this inventing,
this producing, takes place in a pleasing lively
dream. Still the actual hearing of the tout
ensemble is after all the best. What has been
thus produced I do not easily forget, and this is
perhaps the best gift I have my divine Maker to
thank for.
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Giuseppe Tartini (inventor of modern violin bow)
wrote The Devils Sonata from a dream.
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Robert Louis Stephenson in an essay on his
amazing creativity and his dreams wrote Well,
as regards the dreamer, I can answer that, for he
is no less a person than myselfand for the
Little People, what shall I say they are but my
Brownies. God bless them! Who do one-half my work
while I am fast asleep, and in all human
likelihood, do the rest for me as well, when I am
wide awake and fodly suppose I do it for myself.
From such dream work came works like The Strange
Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
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Richard Wagners epic opera Das Rheingold
opened in his dream
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William Wordsworth said he often wrote from a
dream state
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Einstein- entire scientific career based on a
childhood dream.
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I could mention many more Richard
Strauss Brahms William Blake Keats Percy
Bysshe Shelly Tchaikovsky
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The point is, many of human kinds most creative
people and the produce of that creativity are
directly linked to their dreams
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While awake we move through our lives in a
sequential, linear moment-by-moment fashion with
a point representing birth and another point the
present moment. But when we go to sleep and begin
to dream we create pictures of whats outside of
our waking organizations. Richard M. Jones
in Dreams are Wiser Than Men
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In other words- dreams take us outside of the
box and into a world of immense potential and
creativity.
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Who Dreams ? ? ?

• Everyone dreams, every night

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Dreams of Deaf and Blind

• Repeated studies have documented that deaf and
  blind individuals dream. It is not the purpose of
  this talk to go into these dreams in any special
  ways. Rather, I will look at dreams
  genericallythat is, in ways applicable to all
  populations in general. This will allow for
  adaptations of dream work within special needs
  populations. On going, adaptive comments will be
  made throughout this presentation.

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• A Simple, Practical Method of Working With
  Dreams-
• Your Own
• or
• Someone Elses

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Remembering Your Dreams

• Average person dreams 5 to 7 times each night
• Many people have no dream recollection
• Remembering dreams takes conscious intention and
  preparation
• Preacher story- prayn for rain.

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Dream Recollection

• Intension as you go to bed
• Note pad, pen by the bed
• Upon waking- look for the dream
• Retain body position
• Rehearse dream summary
• Outline, the narrative

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Writing the Narrative

• Pretend its a movie
• Note scenery, plot, characters, sets
• Move from your outline to a full script
• When completed, re-read it and give it a title

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What Title ?

• Pretend youre Fellini
• Identify key symbols
• People
• Objects
• Colors, sounds, directions
• Direct statements
• Animals, creature
• So, what shall we call it ?

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Working With the Symbols

• Once identified, look at them one by one
• What associations do you have with each one?
• Write these associations down
• Go through the entire list
• When done, read what youve written down back to
  yourself

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Coming to An Understanding

• The dream is trying to tell you something
• But it is using symbols and metaphors to do this
• This is done in part to get this information past
  your sensor the Ego

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Elias Howes Dream

• Everyone trying to invent a sowing machine.
• The needle and the thread were both the key and
  the stumbling block
• Everybody was trying to thread the needle at the
  back
• Howe saw natives with spears with holes in the
  tips of their spears

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Such a dream may seem obvious to you and I today,
but that is because we already know about needles
and sowing machines.Howe had to figure it out.
He had to interpret what the dream was telling
him.Once he did, the rest was history.
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A Sample of Dream Work

• Who has a dream theyd like to share?

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Review of the Process

• Write it down (flip chart)
• Find Symbols
• Associate symbols
• Title
• Review Interpret
• Whats the message?

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Dream Incubation
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Take a problem, situation, or idea to bed with
you with the clear and expressed intention of
dreaming about it.
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After the dream comes to you during the night, be
ready to write it down and work with it when you
wake up.You may be utterly amazed at the
inspiration it provides.
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Most of all, learn to be aware of your dreams.
Put them to use. They are one of your most
valuable creative resources.
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It is my personal opinion that in the science of
the future reality will neither be psychic nor
physical but somehow both and somehow neither.
Nobel Prize Physicist, Wolgang Pauli (Mindell,
2004) 15. (A close friend of C. G. Jung)The
math of physics is like the dream behind
reality. (Mindell, 2004) 5
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Resources to Read

• Inner Work by Robert A. Johnson
• Dreams, Gods Forgotten Language, by John A.
  Stanford