The Power of Dream Circles with Connie Kaplan by Celeste Adams

I recently joined a Dream Circle group taught by Connie Kaplan here in Santa Monica.

Throughout most of my life, I've kept a dream journal. Some years, I recorded dreams a few times a week. Other years, I might just record a couple of dreams every other month or so. And looking back at my journal, now, I wish that I had followed Carl Jung's example and taken the time to record my dreams every single night. They reveal so much about the truth of our feelings, the changes we need to make, and the way our individual thoughts connect to the collective unconscious.

During the night, when I am half awake and think about a dream I've just had, I sometimes say that it is not significant, and so I don't make the effort to record it. But when I do take the time to write the dream down, I find that it always offers a wealth of information.

I took the time last night to record a dream so that I could bring it to my dream circle. I'll tell you about this now, so that you can have a first-hand feeling for what it's like to be in a dream circle and the kinds of understandings we may arrive at through sharing our dreams.

In this circle, one of the things we do with dreams is to give them a title. My dream's title began as "Leaving a Contaminated Shangri-La."

During the meeting, as my levels of understanding of the dream increased, my title for the dream changed to "Understanding that Shangri-La Is Within." And an alternate title, "Finding the Ticket," became "I Am the Ticket."

In this dream, I am crossing thawed ice on a melting glacier in a country that looks like Tibet:

A brilliant sun rises over lofty, snow-capped mountains — maybe the Himalayas. It is early in the morning, 5:00 AM or so, and large numbers of people are coming down from the high mountains and walking across the plateau. No dwellings are visible on the horizon, so I conclude that the people must be coming out of hidden dwellings carved into the mountains. They carry no possessions, except for the few items contained in small backpacks made of handmade textiles.

The people are quiet, and the land is ominously stark and still. I notice how strange it is that there are no birds flying overhead and no sounds of animal life.

We're all walking in the same direction, toward a checkout point. I glance back, one time only, at the distant mountains that look like the entrance to Shangri-La. Rays of sunlight are refracted through branches of trees that line the edges of the mountaintops. However, although it would make a beautiful photograph, I am more concerned that my feet step only on the ice and not the Earth. Why? Because I am trying to avoid getting a highly contagious disease that can be picked up through the feet as it touches the Earth. Walking only on ice is challenging, because the ice is thin in parts and has even melted in some areas.

The other people around me are not taking this important precaution in their long walk to the checkpoint — they are single-mindedly focused on getting to their destination.

I had prepared myself hours in advance for my departure, putting everything in perfect order. When I finally reach the checkpoint, a guard in a dark green military jacket and fur-rimmed hat, with a round face and Asian eyes, wants to see my ticket. He holds out a cold hand, and utters a word I don't understand. I notice the mist from his breath in the crisp air.

I pull out tiny, light green scraps of paper, but none of the scraps of paper has a handwritten notation saying that it's a ticket. I recall that I might have put the paper to my lips and held it there for a moment, earlier in the day. Perhaps the writing blurred or faded when I did that. Perhaps one of these scraps of green paper could really be the ticket.

I look at the guard and sense that he is not firm in preventing me from crossing over. He will be influenced by what I project. I can direct this situation. If I speak with a hundred percent conviction and say that I have a ticket, he will let me through. But if I have even a fraction of a doubt about not having a legitimate ticket, he will sense that and will not let me through.

Many perspectives were offered as we discussed this dream in the dream circle. The main ones were:

There is no longer any physical place to hide, no place that remains untouched by the disease and destruction that threatens the Earth. Even Shangri-La, a secret Himalayan paradise, is no longer a refuge.

The only place left to go to find a safe haven is within.

More important than finding a physical ticket is the greater power of intention in manifesting a change in one's destiny.

And, finally, the ultimate message for me is the reminder that the depth of personal power is limitless once we begin tapping into it.

I also discovered that my dream had a connection to the dreams of other people in the circle. The most common connection was the theme of water. Water ran through all our dreams.

Connie Kaplan herself spoke of a dream that she had on the same night, in which she walks on a path that is covered in several inches of fresh flowing water that comes from a waterfall. There is no danger on her path, since she is leaving the physical world and traveling on this watery path to make her way to a circle of dreamers.

Another woman also had a dream of water that contained a similar theme to mine. In her dream, a dolphin communicates that the people on a boat are not really there for environmental concerns, but have "bad intentions." These fake environmentalists bring up images of the navy using sonar testing in the oceans, and the military's training of dolphins to hunt for mines in the Persian Gulf. In her dream, the ocean has become a dangerous place for dolphins. (In my dream, the Earth had become disease-infected and all creatures were endangered.)

Over time, we see recurring themes in the dreams of the members of the our circle. One recurring theme involves apocalyptic imagery. One woman described 9-11 type images: piles of wreckage from buildings, severed limbs. Another woman was on a plane and looked out the window when she saw Magritte-like bodies floating through the air, wearing business suits and holding briefcases. They looked like the victims of 9-11 who had recently died and were leaving the Earth plane.

In this week's dream circle, there were themes of magical substances that you could ingest, unusual forms of transportation that could transport you through time and space, doughnut shops offering pastries that kept replenishing themselves, bars where people had their auric fields healed, people assuming new names to reflect changes in their life directions, and people moving out of old homes into new ones that expressed new dimensions of themselves.

The images of fear and destruction were balanced by images of healing, growth, and ascension.

Connie Kaplan, the leader of my dream circle, has helped to set up dream circles around the country and has written several books on the subject. This past week, I asked her a few questions about her understanding of the nature of dreams, beginning with the most basic question:

Celeste: What is a dream?

Connie: I'll begin to answer that by saying what a dream is not. A dream is not what people in the Western world have thought it to be.

When we go to sleep, rather than moving into a more private, more personal, more separated level of consciousness, as we have been taught to believe, my dream teachers have shown me that in dreaming we dissolve into a Unified Field of Consciousness in which we are connected to the divine level of soul.

While there, in that familiar darkness of sleep, we experience an energetic and spiritual regeneration. In that state of consciousness, we are connected to all beings, and we exchange information with sentience itself. I call this level the Dimension of Truth.

As we begin to return to ordinary waking reality, our personal minds write a story — a metaphor, if you will — to help us remember what kind of energy we "bathed" in during our sleep. That story is the dream. In other words, a dream is a metaphor for a spiritual renewal experienced in sleep.

Celeste: You speak of different levels of dreams. Could you briefly describe these?

Connie: I have found, both in my own life and in the lives of literally hundreds of students who have worked with me over the last seventeen years, that dreams come in many different types, but that there are four major levels of dreaming. These are:

Personal Dreams: If we are overly tired, too stressed, or extremely narcissistic, the dream stories we write will reflect our state of consciousness and be quite mundane or "psychological" in nature.

Collective Dreams: If we are more spiritually awakened and carry an awareness of the interconnected nature of all beings, our dream stories will likewise reflect that level of consciousness and become more telepathic or psychic in nature.

Transformational Dreams: If we begin really to grow spiritually, our dreaming experiences become healing and instructive, and dreaming actually participates with us in our transformations.

Philanthropic Dreams: If we then develop our compassion and ability to bring lovingkindness into every situation — even that of the dream — our dreams cease to be about ourselves at all; at this point, we discover that during our sleep time we are helping other people and the world at large.

Celeste: In our meetings you have referred to six different guides that have appeared over the years in your dreams. How do we begin to sort through our dreams to find the reappearing voices of our own guides?

Connie: Not everyone has guides that reappear. The guides I mentioned came to me during a very distinct two-year period in which I was immobilized by an undiagnosed physical problem.

Thankfully, not everyone goes through that kind of devastating and deranging type of experience. But almost everyone can recognize a cyclical and recurring nature to their dreaming. By studying the recurring dreams — and although you can do this alone, I highly recommend working with a circle of dreamers — you will discover your dream patterns.

Celeste: How do we categorize our dreams to find common themes and symbols?

Connie: When we are asleep, we relax our willfulness and become more receptive to the influencing energies of the universe — most especially to the energies of the moon, our closest cosmic neighbor. Just as the moon pulls on the tides of the Earth, she pulls on the physical tides of our bodies. So I start by having my clients chart their dreams according to the location of the moon on the night that the dream occurred.

If you look at your dreams in clusters related to the moon — for example, if you look at all the full-moon dreams you had in one year, or all the dreams you had when the moon was in a specific sign of the zodiac — you will definitely see that certain themes and symbols recur under certain lunar circumstances. This, of course, requires spending time with a lunar calendar. It also requires some "outside the box" thinking on your part.

Celeste: Is your work in any way related to that of Carl Jung and the archetypes he connects to the collective unconscious?

Connie: Not at all. My information about dreaming did not come as a result of studying someone else's work or forming opinions based upon a philosophy. It came to me directly through dreaming. I've purposely kept myself "innocent" in order to stay pure with the work I've been given to do.

So rather than compare my work to Jung's, let me just make three brief statements about what I consider to be unique about my own teachings.

My teachings ask the dreamer to "get over" herself rather than to "get into" herself. This kind of dream work isn't about interpretation or analysis. Rather, it gives a dreamer's perspective of the world. This perspective is all-encompassing and it's not personal. It's fully connected to Oneness.

These teachings reverse the myopic Newtonian cosmology of the "me generation," and emphasize unity consciousness. In this respect, they are aligned with the quantum physicists' view of life as made up of interfacing vibrations. When we view a dream as "my dream telling me more about me and my connection to the world," we are polarizing and isolating ourselves. Instead, we can view our dreams as messages to the whole, but messages told through the story of an individuation of the whole. This way of looking opens a much wider door.

Finally, through this work we create community, taking the burden of dream interpretation off of the individual. My teachers assured me that it is not the dreamer's job to interpret his or her dreams. Dream messages "explain" themselves in the way they become alive through the dreamer's community. The dreamer's job is to share the dream, watch it unfold, and be fully physically available to the wonder of it.

Celeste: What are the techniques we can use before going to sleep in order to receive the clearest possible transmission of dreams?

Connie: If you go to bed full of emotion, with a busy mind, and/or too fatigued, your dreamtime will definitely be hijacked!

Each of us has our own bedtime rituals. I recommend in my books a certain kind of prayer ceremony that you can do before bed to clear yourself of emotional residue so that you enter the dreamtime fully free to encounter "truth."

Celeste: I understand that many people around the country are beginning to join dream circles. What do they get out of this?

Connie: Since 9-11, people are looking more deeply for connection and for understanding of how the world works. Book clubs and support groups that formerly functioned as social interactions are now turning to a more substantial format, one that assists the participants in becoming accountable to the world.

Since dreaming is the one spiritual practice that all people have in common, it makes sense that many people are attracted to the idea that dreams may be our most reliable source of truth, and that by hearing the dreams as messages to the community, we may be able to come to deeper understandings of the world we have created.

Celeste: You've written a great deal about organizing dream circles. Could you share some of the techniques you use?

Connie: One technique involves what I call the "dream stone." In a dream-circle meeting, as each person shares a dream, she holds a dream stone. This stone is chosen by the circle to carry the energy and memory of their collective dreaming. You can use any stone. However, in North America the most powerful dream stones are uncut blue crystals, like raw aquamarine. You would use the same stone week after week, year after year.

The purpose of the stone is threefold. First, it incorporates the Native American practice of the "talking stick." If you are holding the stone, you are holding the talking stick.

Second, because stones are the great holders of energy, the dream circle stone literally holds the energy of the dreaming. The more the stone circulates, the greater the stone's power will be to awaken ancient memory in the circle.

Third, the stone carries the energy of the dreaming spiral round and round the circle, amplifying energy as it moves. Each time you take the stone, you will feel that its energy has magnified and you are being drawn into a "higher" place.

The dreamers pass this stone in a counterclockwise direction around the circle. The first time the stone moves around the circle, each person may share a dream. After hearing many dreams in succession, the dreamers relax into a dreaming frame of mind. They have heard a preview of the evening.

A person may share any dream, waking or sleeping, recent or from the distant past. The power of dream-circle work is in speaking the dream.

Often, circles find that they are dreaming together just by lisening to each other's dreams. Hearing familiar symbols come from the mouth of another creates a bond. We learn that we are not dreaming alone. We learn about the interconnectedness of all beings.

The counterclockwise direction is called by some the "shamanic direction." For dreamers, it is the direction of the galactic spin, and the direction the Earth rotates and moves around the sun. It also is the direction the moon moves around the Earth and the direction of the DNA helix. Counterclockwise is the feminine spiral, the spiral of the great nurturing darkness in which the galaxy exists.

Remember, out of this darkness comes all potential. The dream is potential given form.

After completing all the dreams, it is time to close the circle, making sure that people come back into full waking consciousness. Closing the circle is extremely important. because people have to drive or negotiate the journey home. So they must come back from their altered state.

Celeste: How can people organize their own dream circles?

Connie: Leading a dream circle is a unique form of leadership. A dream circle leader must know the "rules" of the circle and how to stay totally faithful to those rules within the circle's context. But it is also necessary to simultaneously be part of a "leaderless" community. This requires the ability to lead by serving — by example, and through the principles of humility and harmony.

Connie Kaplan holds master's degrees in communication and psychology and in 2002 earned a doctorate from the University of Creation Spirituality in Oakland, California.

You may experience her work by connecting with the many dreamers who participate in an online circle at her website, TurtleDreamers.com.

For those who are thinking about starting a dream circle, Connie will be teaching a dream circle leadership course online through her website starting late in May.