Category Archives: Chuck’s Blog

Welcome to Chuck’s Place! This is where Chuck Ketchel, LCSW-R, expresses his thoughts, insights, and experiences! Currently, Chuck posts an essay once a week, currently on Tuesdays, along the lines of inner work, psychotherapy, Jungian thought and analysis, shamanism, alchemy, politics, or any theme that makes itself known to him as the most important topic of the week. Many of the shamanic and psychological terms used in Chuck’s essays are defined in Tools & Definitions on our Psychotherapy page.

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Chuck’s Place: Shadow—Friend or Foe?

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At a gathering of student analysts eager for exactitude in definition, Jung, in an exasperated reaction, expressed that the shadow was simply the whole unconscious! If it’s not in the light, it’s in the shadow. And what lies in the darkness—that unknown part of ourselves—effects us profoundly, though we see it not.

In a dream, Jan and I are walking up a hill. It is night, dark and cloudy. Suddenly, I realize we are standing on slippery snow/ice and I lose my balance, falling, sliding down into the unknown, completely unable to see. I keep my composure but have no possible way to orient myself. I am truly in the shadow, without light. I awaken.

It’s the morning of June 21st, the summer solstice, Jeanne’s birthday. Jan has just emerged from a similar dream. Clearly, I am being shown that we are headed into the unknown—something that cannot be controlled. Can we get comfortable with the ride? Isn’t it really all preparation for the journey we all must inevitably take—our ultimate appointment with death? Isn’t it all about getting comfortable enough with the ride into the unknown so that we might find safe passage?

Isn’t it really our daily challenge to allow ourselves to go forward and grow, to become a new self as we integrate new truths of who we are into our lives? Or do we awaken stubbornly each day, insisting to reincarnate our familiar selves, grasping onto our familiar habitual attitudes and habits?

Jung resisted exactitude in definition because he respected the unknown and unknowable too much to assign anything more to a definition than a possibility or a metaphor. Rather than shirking scientific responsibility here, he was instead expressing scientific humility—a true scarcity in our modern world.

What Jung could hint about the shadow, however, was the compensatory function it served to balance our ego’s stranglehold over the unrealized or unconscious portion of the psyche.

In practical terms, if we consciously insist on attitudes or behaviors that thwart our deeper selves, the shadow will strike, as Freud observed, with verbal slips that reveal our heart’s true sentiment. In other instances, our shadow may have gathered enough steam to literally take possession of the ego as we find ourselves possessed by an intense mood or affect that takes control of our otherwise level behavior.

These states of possession can range from a profound depression to extreme acting out where ego control is literally obliterated. These are the extremes that lead us to fear the shadow, brand it as evil, and seek relief through a controlled life of goodness. Indeed, at an extreme state of imbalance the shadow might strike in an evil way.

On closer examination, however, we might discover that what we brand as evil—and may in fact be evil—is the compensatory action of the unknown part of ourselves, reacting to the falsity or limitation of our conscious attitude. Here, the shadow drives us to extremes to wake us up to grapple with other facts and truths within ourselves.

The more rigidly we cling to a one-sided attitude, the more intense must be the shadow’s counterattack to both balance us out and awaken us to introspection upon the truth of who we are, what we feel, and what we need.

Ultimately, the role of the shadow is to expand our consciousness by leading us into greater acquaintance with our unknown selves and our true reason for being in this life. We cannot, as my dream depicts, avoid our slide into the darkness, into the unknown.

Truthfully, what do we really know? What we think we really know is but the ego’s castles in the sand that, as Jan’s dream of Monday night depicts, will be washed away by the tidal wave of the shadow. The question that emerges in both of our dreams, and in the time of now, is: How we will take the slide or ride the inevitable waves of our lives?

Can we get calm in the midst of the unfamiliar? Are we open to discovering more of who we are as we glide into the unknown where even a compass doesn’t work?

Jung was wise to resist the exactitude of definition. Exactitude becomes another ego sand castle. However, Jung’s discovery of the mechanism of compensation provides a basis for relationship with our unknown selves.

Rather than get caught in the moralism of good and evil, or goodness and badness, we can suspend those judgments and shift to an appreciation for darkness as necessary to prod and challenge our ego self to broaden its purview into the vast unknown of the self with an attitude of respect and discovery.

In this respect, shadow is truly a friend yet also a foe that pushes us onward and keeps us honest.

Calm without a compass,
Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: Present Without Props

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The female cohorts of Carlos Castaneda would laugh mysteriously as they described Carlos’s romance with knowledge. He would lie down and cover his body with books, literally absorbing knowledge through their many points of contact with his body. Carlos had released the prop that reading must happen through the eyes only; he suspended judgment and opened to new channels of learning within himself.

Oftentimes, during recapitulation, people begin to experience all kinds of physical sensations at different places inside and on the outside of their bodies. These sensations can be so unexpected and powerful that many times medical consultation is sought. Once cleared of medical etiology another possibility may be considered. Perhaps the sensation is an active communication of knowledge from some other point on the body self. Perhaps the recapitulation has opened the channels to knowledge that may have been stored by the body self some fifty years ago. Perhaps the body self is inviting us into the full knowledge of the experiences of our life lived through direct sensorial experience.

This is very often the case in recapitulation; a united effort by the body self to fill in the blanks in our memory of life already lived. This experience of recapitulation, whether intentionally sought or unintentionally triggered, asks us to drop the prop of our rationality that tells us that the body neither stores memory nor communicates independently of the mind.

How terrifying it can be to stay fully present and absorb this body of knowledge! The body generally “speaks” through direct sensorial experience that can range from pleasure to overwhelming pain. Often, if we allow ourselves to take the sensation journey with our body, channels may open to smells, temperature, and sounds, as well as triggering images, scenes, and eventually full movies of forgotten experience. The overall experience can range from subtle to riveting—the roller coaster of a lifetime.

Intimacy, in relationship, might also be defined as staying present without the props. How deeply might we allow ourselves to stare into each other’s eyes? How accepting might we be of sitting with each other, fully present, in utter silence? How long before the mind provides a thought to be discussed, a prop of distraction to create conversation, abstraction in place of presence? Can we not do the routines that have formed the crust and definition of our relationship—the props of habit—and open ourselves to new truths of who we are or who our partner is?

Finally, can we be fully present with ourselves, occupying the seat of the observer? Can we let go of the props of music or voice at the ear, computer or TV in the eye, food or drink in the mouth, book or cell phone in the hand?

Can we simply be present without judgment, unattached to thought, experiencing sensation and energy as it flows in the body? Can we notice the sound and vibration of energy? Can we allow it to deepen? Can we journey with it, uninterrupted by props?

Let’s see what happens!
Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: Abuse of Power—In the Service of Whom?

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In a dream, Jan and I are parked in our little black car in a vast Stop & Shop supermarket parking lot. We’re just sitting, quietly and calmly, Jan in the driver’s seat, I next to her in the passenger seat. A pick-up truck pulls in tightly to my side. A man opens his door, which smacks into our door. I’m not particularly fazed and turn to Jan and say: “See, that’s how we get those marks on the car when we’re parked.”

The man, who didn’t skip a beat after hitting into the door, walked away obliviously—we simply didn’t exist for him. He took no responsibility whatsoever for having left a scratch on our little car. However, after I made that comment to Jan, he turned and got back into his truck and pulled out, cutting his wheels too much and causing his car to catch part of our bumper and actually begin to drag us along. Eventually, it unhinged, but just as before he acted completely oblivious; not that he was refusing to take responsibility, but even more profoundly, he simply didn’t care even to waste the energy on us to defend himself—we simply didn’t exist.

I had this dream the night it was exposed that Pachamama had used Tweetie Bird to bring down Anthony Weiner, just another of her recent targets: high-powered men who abuse their power. This dream dramatizes the utter blindness, narcissism, and outright disregard by masculine energy when it dominates the personality. What this means inwardly for such a domineering individual is the total negation of the feminine energy within the self.

The feminine energy within all selves, male and female, is the energy that opens, receives, holds, joins, and nurtures life, bringing us into a deep experience of interconnectedness and oneness of all things. Feminine energy, when polarized and dominant, can bring forth death and destruction to clear the way for new life. We find ourselves in such a time now. Pachamama has gained the ascendancy after centuries of polarized abuse by dominant masculine power. Pachamama is on the warpath, and we are all feeling the impact of her path of destruction, as she prepares the planet for new life.

My dream dramatizes the abuse of masculine power that has led to Pachamama’s targeted rebalancing efforts. In the dream, the existence of Jan and I, our car, and damage to our car are not only dismissed; there is no evidence of any feminine energy present in this man to value or care about us. In the case of the driver of the truck, his dominant masculine energy is in the service of his narcissistic self: oblivious, unfeeling, and completely dismissive of the world around him. Whose needs within the self are being served by this tyrannical, self-serving despot who is blind to the needs or even existence of others? I propose that the culprit is a very primitive ego state, in control behind the scenes of what appears to be an adult.

There is a stage in the ontological development of the psychological self that Freud termed primary narcissism. Margaret Mahler called this same stage symbiosis to highlight the oneness of the unit of parent and child. Esther Harding coined the term autos to define this stage. I will use Ester Harding’s term autos to capture the ego state that all of these pioneers in psychology were talking about when reflecting upon the experience of the human being in earliest infancy.

In infancy, it is normal and appropriate to be completely absorbed within the narcissistic shell of the self. At this age there is no differentiation of self and other. Self is everything. At this stage of near utter helplessness the world must revolve around the needs of the infant—even read those needs without them being expressed—for that infant to survive and thrive. To the infant, the parent’s needs for sleep, rejuvenation and recreation don’t matter—they simply don’t exist. Plain and simple, the world is all about ME, as it should be, AT THAT AGE.

As development progresses beyond infancy, consciousness gradually awakens to a world of others, separate beings with their own needs. Growing up becomes a progressive paring down—or suppression of the world view and the power of the early stage of primary narcissism, with its primitive ego state of autos—in the service of becoming an autonomous independent person, capable of caring for self and becoming a contributing member of an interdependent community.

The charming baby of infancy, once cooed over, becomes the big baby of adulthood if it fails to acquiesce to more socialized and autonomous ego states. In truth, the autos of yesteryear remains an enduring ego state in all adults. All must struggle with the desire to return to the safety and security of being totally taken care of, loved, provided all that she/he needs or wants; the expectation of needs being met simply because they are so important.

This autos ego state may have been thrown out of the Garden too soon, never allowed to fully experience safety and love, or it may have been neglected and abused, or it may simply continue its longing to return to that paradisal state of oneness—without any effort. Nonetheless, as we emerge from early childhood our autos is forced into the background as we must navigate and adapt to the complexities and expectations of a world that demands that we too give.

When the autos remains dominant we find the child who demands all the focus and all the toys. In the autos state we want what we want when we want it. The autos has no energy to think about you. In truth, as with the truck driver in my dream—you simply don’t exist. And if you do exist your value lies only in your ability to serve the elemental needs of comfort, security, and pleasure. If an adult is covertly possessed by the autos ego state, beware its Trojan horse—often called seduction. The true motive may be to draw you in, ultimately to serve its own needs of comfort, security, and pleasure.

Anthony Weiner, in my judgment, is just the latest example of a man covertly controlled by his autos, emboldened and empowered by the dominant control of masculine energy. Sending an anatomical picture over the Internet and having tantalizing on-line dialogue is still, ultimately, an absorption in self-pleasuring. All interaction and stimulation takes place in the imagination, within the self. “Sexual contact” at this level is masturbatory—an offshoot of narcissism and self-pleasuring—it’s safe, you’re in total control. BUT, there is no real relationship, real connection, with a real person. This type of contact, actually, suspends real-ity. Real contact with a real woman or other person requires opening up to the feminine energy within the self, in all sexes. Only through that feminine energy can true merging and contact be made to unite with another.

Furthermore, even if Anthony Weiner made real contact with a woman he’d met on the Internet he is not a real person at that meeting. He is a fragmented being who has left his husband self at home. The bottom line: real relationship is simply too much work for the adult possessed by their autos.

Women are not exempt from the dominance of male energy within the self acting in the service of the autos either. Women must examine their own modus operandi in choosing partners. If, secretly, the autos’s need for safety and security, completely provided by another, is in control of the personality, then that woman’s masculine energy may act decisively on the autos’s behalf, choosing a dominant narcissistic partner who demands a caretaker/lover that the woman might overtly protest, but covertly covet, feeling secure in being taken care of.

At the other extreme, the autos may enlist the dominant masculine energy to choose a passive partner to covertly be assured of getting what she wants, though she might overtly protest that partner’s lack of drive, imagination, or initiative.

All must assume responsibility now for scrutinizing the interplay between masculine and feminine energies within the self. We are on the precipice of a major shift away from a free ride for dominant masculine energy control. All are charged to act in concert with Pachamama toward a new balance. But behind this balance of energetic forces lies the autos self, which must be reckoned with and put to bed. Pachamama has little nurturance or patience for the autos ruling an adult. In fact, as is abundantly evident, it arouses her destructive fury.

Time to get out of the nest and take responsibility, as an adult self, for the greater interconnected needs and survival of all.

Chuck

P.S.: I had completed this blog the other night and read it to Jan. Though it felt complete, I sensed there was something more to be said. I woke last night thinking of the blog and then had this dream:

Jan and I are in a rural setting. An old bridge had been repaired. It’s not a bridge of much consequence, but it’s the only bridge to get to the road that leads to more significant bridges.

I am driving over the bridge a little too fast. It’s only a narrow two-lane bridge. Suddenly, an oncoming car swerves directly at us with what appears to be an inevitable head-on collision as there is no place for me to go. At the last second the other car swerves back into its lane and we both stop.

I rush over to the driver, an Asian woman, who has already gotten out of her car and is busily typing on her laptop. I am now the observer, as she and a man take off their clothes. She mounts him and they begin to have intercourse. Suddenly, another woman, an older woman, appears who watches them intensely, first with an expression of shock, then anger, then jealousy, and finally deep wrenching sadness. As the Asian woman orgasms the older woman holds her, desperately trying to share some aspect of her experience.

This dream dramatically stops me and insists that I include one more point in my blog. The older woman in this dream embodies the impact of her controlling dominant masculine energy upon her own fulfillment. The experience of orgasm is a door to the deep feminine energy of Kundalini, an energetic rapture of ecstatic proportion. Letting go to such an engulfment can be fraught with fear for anyone, whether alone in a masturbatory experience of self-union or with a partner.

A woman might call upon her masculine energy to shut down her deep feminine energy under the terror of loss of self and dissolution—just as a man might limit his sexual experience to images of woman or objectified, depersonalized interactions with an actual woman—similarly protecting herself from the terror of loss of self in engulfment or failure in actual relational experience. In this case, the dominance of the autos ego state is protection at a very primary level. It is likely that the psyche, in this case, is housing a tremendum of unrecapitulated trauma that the autos, in its striving for safety, directs its masculine energy to cut off and protect itself from, resulting in loss of the feminine.

The challenge for both sexes is to release the stranglehold of control that dominant masculine energy can have on the need for deep union within the self, with a partner, and with the greater world. However, we must look beyond the dominance of masculine energy and address who is really in control and why.

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Chuck’s Place: Life is Bipolar

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“Dad! Nathan and I just did the giant slingshot! We shot way up into the sky overlooking Myrtle Beach; it was awesome! I feel so great, I’ve never felt like this in my life!”

Ten minutes later, a second phone call:

“Dad. We just got back to where I parked my car. It’s gone, they towed it away. I’m so depressed, I’ve never felt this bad in my life.”

“Well Erica, you’ve just experienced, firsthand, bipolar disorder—a better lesson than you’ll ever get in a psychopathology class at school.”

It is the consequence of bouncing between polar extremes that gives bipolar a bad name, but the truth is that all life is produced and powered by two mutually dependent opposing energies. In my daughter’s experience these opposing energies are opposite ends of the same system. What goes up must come down. What goes way up must come way down.

Everything that exists is a composite of opposing energies. All elements are constituted of opposing energies that bond them together. Electricity contains positive and negative energies, which combined create power. Daily life requires day and night—awake active time and sleep dormant time to rejuvenate and sustain itself. We strive for order but hunger for chaos. The light or ‘rational day’ dims to the irrational release of the night. Boredom is the result of too much living in the day. Addiction is too much living in the night. The human challenge is to reconcile these bipolar energies within the self. Most problems in life arise from an overattachment to one or the other opposing energies. True reconciliation must include an acceptance and joining of both of these primal energies.

In the East, this human dilemma is energetically seen in the spine of the human body. At the base of the spine, in the sacrum bone, resides Kundalini Shakti, a primordial cosmic energy, the divine feminine creative power, corporeal energy at the feminine pole. Kundalini lies coiled up like a snake, dormant, awaiting awakening. At the crown of the head resides Vishnu, the supreme masculine god, associated with light and the sun. Many yogic practitioners focus meditation upon awakening Kundalini to rise through the chakras and ultimately merge with Vishnu in transcendent bliss.

In the East, this androgynous bipolar nature in humans—that is, as containers of both masculine and feminine energy—is depicted in gods with genitalia of both sexes. In the West, these primal energies have been completely polarized and assigned to respective sexes: men as masculine energy, women as feminine energy. The contrasexual nature in both men and women is projected outwardly onto members of the opposite sex, or onto members of the same sex who nonetheless personify opposite energy. Herein lies the compulsion to relationship in the West. If we are sex-typed to only one of our primal energies we are compelled to seek the other in relationship in order to achieve wholeness and completion. The inner mysterious other energy can only be found ‘out there’ in another. We must find it, possess it, and merge with it, after all, it is us—we cannot live without it.

Of course, the opposition inherent in these opposing energies is no less challenging to resolve in relationship than it is in doing years of meditation and yogic practice. People enter relationships, briefly, under the romance of felt wholeness—having finally joined with their lost other, their soul mate—only to shortly encounter the conflicts that naturally arise between polar opposites.

One polar energy always seeks to control or dominate the other. Each wants the world their way. Compromise, more often than not, results in secret resentment. Well-ordered agreement often results in secret chaotic affair. True relationship, deep intimacy, requires a genuine meeting and joining of Kundalini and Vishnu, not a meeting of power and subservience.

The split and projection of polar energies in the Western psyche is also evident in the rise of science and the downfall of organized religion. Religion once ruled the world; early scientists were put to death. In the modern world, though many in the West affiliate with a particular religion, it’s far less a spiritual affair and more of a social identity. Now science rules.

Actually, modern Western religion aligns itself more with science and rationality than it would appear. The deep connection to spirituality—the feminine power of intuition and religious or numinous experience—split off from the tightly controlled, rule-based rational church and synagogue long ago and found life in the secret traditions of alchemy, the Kabbalah, astrology, and the like. We read the weather report to satisfy our rational, ordered lives and the horoscope to feed our mysterious, intuitive, irrational lives.

With the election of Obama, America, and frankly the entire world, saw the transfer of power from the masculine pole to the feminine pole. It’s not just racism that seeks to unseat and destroy Obama; it’s a black and white issue at a deeper level. Blackness is associated with the darkness, the night, the earth, the maternal, the feminine, the mysterious, the irrational, the Kundalini energy of the self. In our fragmented Western world, whiteness—bright, light, rational, masculine energy—that has dominated the world for so long, in a deeply polarized fashion, leading to its current extremely precarious condition, is threatened and reacting with all the hysterics currently played out by the Republican party. Though Obama has, in actuality, fallen way short of Pachamama’s true need to be properly cared for, he nonetheless symbolizes a shift away from the long domineering, extremely polarized masculine energy bent on greed and destruction.

Looking elsewhere in the world, we see the same interplay of polarized energies, interestingly and relevantly, in the main players of World War II. Japan, who destroyed Pearl Harbor in a blast of masculine aggression that drew the United States into World War II, has been devastated by the recent tsunami, with Pachamama directing her energy at nuclear power plants.

On Memorial Day, Germany, the main perpetrator of abuse of masculine power in World War II, announced the decision to close all nuclear power plants over the next decade. Furthermore, Germany’s economy has grown slowly but steadily in the midst of the current world recession. This economic growth has not been at the expense of social programs and basic needs in Germany. Germany has been willing to grow less and take care of the needs of its citizens, as well as prepare to pay more for energy as it gives up nuclear power as a source of energy. Germany, with this decision, is doing the right thing for itself and the health of the world. Here we have a country that, after brutalizing the world and attempting to extinguish a scapegoated people, has emerged with a conscience and a new balance of masculine and feminine energies, showing genuine leadership in the modern world.

Finally, Israel—though well-prepared for prior to World War II, through a well-established Zionist movement—is a modern country created and sanctified as a compensation to a people nearly wiped out during World War II. Unfortunately, as subsequent history has proven, this did not go smoothly, as displaced Palestinians and Arab neighbors have not been so accepting of this decision by the Allied Powers. Israelis in turn, well-schooled by centuries of Diasporas and holocausts, dug in their heels to fiercely preserve their people and their homeland.

Today, that protective fierceness has polarized into dominance by masculine energy and a rigidity that Obama recently challenged by insisting that negotiation with the Palestinians be based on the 1967 border agreement. How will it play out? Resolution will require a reconciliation of the bipolar energies—clear boundaries (masculine pole) that care for the welfare of all peoples (feminine pole).

Our bipolar selves and bipolar world demand that we take on the challenge of finding our wholeness in acceptance and reconciliation of the opposing energies that we are. This requires owning our bipolar nature and forging a relationship with opposing energies. There are hopeful signs in the world now that our bipolar disorder may find its way into the balance of a new bipolar order.

Bi! Bi!
Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: Invitation to a Dream

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When we say good night to the world and drift into sleep, the golden person, the immortal one, the energy body, the soul, gently moves away from the nest of the physical body, though still safely attached by a thin silver ethereal cord, to begin its night journey in the daybreak of a dream.

Those journeys beyond the body, beyond the dense energy of the physical world, are our natural opportunity to dip into and explore the world of pure energy, infinity itself. This is why the Hindus and the Tibetan Buddhists call the bardo of the dream the bardo of death.

In dying, our incarnate essence leaves its nest for the final time, this time with its umbilical cord severed, as it is born into the greater world of energy. To the Buddhists and Hindus the ability to smoothly make that transition, that is, to be able to sustain a sense of cohesion and awareness beyond the body, to be ready to continue life beyond the physical world, determines what comes next. Will we choose to reincarnate in this world, in another carnate round of preparation, or, from an enlightened place, continue the journey beyond the carnate, beyond the body, in infinity?

Buddhists, Hindus and the Seers of Ancient Mexico spend much of their energy in this life becoming familiar and comfortable with life in the bardo of the dream to prepare for their definitive journey at the time of their death in this world.

Every night we do die to this world when we enter sleep and life beyond the body. I recall, as a child, when I first became aware of this truth. I realized that when I closed my eyes to sleep I could not be certain I’d return, the terror of which interrupted my going to sleep for weeks. Every person must pass this gate of challenge in this life. Many get waylaid at this gate, starting in childhood as we cling to parents, lights, and rituals to assure safe passage through the night and rebirth the next morning.

Children are not fully socialized, that is, they have yet to be talked out of their knowing perceptions of energetic life that they encounter beyond the physical world. They are challenged to reconcile with these ‘imaginary friends’ or stand up to scary projections. Seniors, as they prepare to die, often have clear visitations with evolved energetic beings—people they once knew, though long gone from this world—who come to prepare them for safe transition into the next life. Dying people may experience the lifting of the socialized rational veil that once blocked these perceptions and find themselves in a condition professionals often call dementia.

In between childhood and the dusk of life we are all challenged every night to let our physical bodies go to rest and open to a world of energy. So awesome is this task that it’s no wonder we remember so little of where we’ve been and what we’ve done during our nighttime adventures.

When I prepare to sleep at this stage of my life, I simply note when I need to return to this world, with the total confidence that I will be dropped off—that is, awoken—at the exact moment I’ve asked to arrive. What happens in between leaving and arriving is sheer magic, mystery, and adventure. Time and space are nonexistent in that world. I can awaken from but a moment of dreaming and recall endless dream journeys in what was only a minute or two of actual time. The only question is how aware I will be in the dream, or really, how much I will allow myself to remember.

It’s all about remembering. That is the essence of recapitulation in waking life. The more we remember the more we recover of ourselves. It’s not really about the skill of memory. It’s more about our readiness to expand our knowing of ourselves. Can we accept aspects of ourselves that seem foreign and uncomfortable and unfamiliar to our working sense of self? Are we ready to allow ourselves to experience the energetic world that is generally checked by the filter of rationality, keeping us fixated on the dense world of solid objects?

We owe to psychoanalysis the resuscitation of the dream, a modern attempt to reclaim the value of the night. There is indeed much to be gained by the analysis of dreams, much to be discovered about the shadow dimension of ourselves in the unrestricted playground of the dream. Again though, the challenge: how prepared are we to accept the unacceptable or unknown aspects of ourselves? Despite the analytical value of the dream, this approach does lend itself to domination by the ego with its monkey mind that quickly and associatively springs away from the dream itself.

Native American approaches to dreaming and the night became popularized and made accessible to the masses by Patricia Garfield with the publication of her book Creative Dreaming in 1974. She researched how the dream in the Native American world functioned as an active playing field that was valued as much as that of waking life. A father instructs his son, awoken by a nightmare, to return to the dream and actively confront the bear who chased him.

Carlos Castaneda’s publication of The Art of Dreaming in 1993 opened the gate to the active side of infinity through the step by step development of conscious dreaming. Don Juan made it clear that our dreaming attention was a dormant ability simply awaiting our attention. If we merely call to it, it will awaken, and with it our growing ability to venture into the bardo of the dream with awareness.

For myself, I am well aware that most of what I know comes to me in my nightly journeys. Though I don’t always remember the experiences, I clearly retain the lessons. Deja vu is really just a moment of remembering. I know that my dreaming partners, Jan and Jeanne, are amused at my reluctant remembering.

I offer these rudimentary steps to those who wish to accept the invitation to a dream:

1. Know that you are already a dreamer.

2. Put a pen and dream notebook next to your pillow with a handy light. Better yet, as Jan suggests, learn to write in the dark, in your sleep!

3. State your intent to remember your dream. Say it out loud—I intend to remember my dream!

4. When you awaken, no matter how tired and certain you are that you can’t possibly forget your dream, write it down!

5. Dismiss not the tiniest fragment of a dream. Every morsel is a golden nugget.

6. Know that you are safe and protected; you can always wake up if you need to.

7. If you don’t want to be in the dream you are in, change it! State your intent, change the dream, or wake up.

8. Treat your dream as a lesson of some sort. When you review the dream keep it simple. Imagine your dream was a movie you had just seen. Say to yourself: What do I feel, what do I take from it? What possible relevance might this have for my life? If nothing comes, let it sit, take another look later. Watch what happens in the day. Perhaps the dream will suddenly make sense in an encounter you might have.

I conclude with a story and a song. Carlos Castaneda and don Juan Matus enjoyed going to the movies together. One movie struck don Juan’s fancy: You Only Live Twice. I’m not certain it was the Bond girls don Juan liked. I think it was the song of the same title, sung by Nancy Sinatra. Here’s the link.

Sweet dreams,
Chuck